


Geometric Problems

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Botanical and Ecological Research as Backdrop to Relationship Issues, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Past Stucky, Established Relationship, Established Stony, Experimental agriculture, Food Issues, Jealousy, Kissing, Light Angst, Light Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Polyamory, Prompt Fill, Quickly Becomes Stuckony, Secrets, V-Polyamory, a truly disgusting method of consuming pizza, botanical research, restorative naps, weight loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 15:19:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23713504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: When Bucky Barnes finally comes in from the cold after spending months on the run from SHIELD and HYDRA alike, his face is exactly the same as the assassin from D.C., but something about his body seems off. His entire silhouette has changed, and his right arm no longer matches the left.The more time Tony spends observing the man he opened his relationship for, the more he realizes that Bucky's body is still struggling under Hydra's legacy.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Tony Stark, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 27
Kudos: 237
Collections: Bucky Barnes Bingo 2020, Marvel Polyship Bingo 2020, Tony Stark Bingo 2020





	Geometric Problems

**Author's Note:**

> Tony Stark Bingo T4: Dinner/Restaurant  
> Marvel Polyship Bingo G5: Diet  
> Bucky Barnes Bingo B2: Takeout/Pizza

When Bucky finally announced that he was ready to stop blowing up HYDRA bases and sending government organizations the world over on wild goose chases, he did it by inviting himself into one of Tony’s more rural, isolated properties and planting himself in front of one of Jarvis’s cameras. 

Steve was overjoyed when Tony first told him, but by the time they hit hour five in the car, speeding their way west towards southwestern New York, he was a wreck. Serum or no, the human brain wasn’t built to handle every emotion at once. The blotchy redness and trailing tears from his crying served to deepen the anger-flush and the shame-flush until his whole face resembled a ripe strawberry. Only his thin, pulled-taught lips were pale. Never in his life had Tony seen such a tight-lipped smile radiate so much happiness. 

And god damn it but Steve still looked gorgeous even when his face was trying to perform every biological function at once. Not even his snotty nose could make him less attractive. It was unnatural. 

Eventually, enough was enough. He pulled over to the first patch of roadside gravel he saw, turned off the engine, and turned to his boyfriend. 

He opened his mouth to say something comforting, but before he could get a word out Steve lunged across the seat divider and pulled Tony into a hug. 

“Hey, we’re good, we’re all good,” he cooed awkwardly as he rubbed what he hoped were calming circles into Steve’s back. “Bucky’s not in the wind anymore, he came back all by himself. Isn’t that what you’ve been hoping for?”

Steve made unintelligible blubbering noises and tucked his face into Tony’s shoulder. 

“Wanna try that again, honey?”

Steve lifted his shoulder the bare minimum distance from Tony’s shoulder to wipe his wet eyes and press a tissue to his nose, then pressed himself right back against Tony’s sleeve. 

“He looked so  _ lost, _ Tony. Like he was just about to disintegrate. I know he needed space, and I know you said that it’s healthier to let him make his own choices and set his own boundaries, but seeing him like that- he shouldn’t have to look so lost. I should be there helping him.”

He sniffled loudly. A damp spot began to grow where his face was pressed to Tony’s shirt. 

Tony tried to resume patting his back comfortingly, but with Steve’s face now pinning his closest shoulder to the seat he had to reach around with his other arm, which couldn’t quite reach. 

“I know, honey, I know. But he came back, didn’t he? How lost can he be if he knew where to go to not only get in contact with you, but get you to come all the way out here, away from prying eyes?”

God he hoped those were the right words to say. He’d never seen Steve so openly emotional. He was always so tightly controlled, even when he  _ did _ allow himself to show what he was feeling. Even when Steve had been too much of an emotional mess for Fury to let him stay at SHIELD headquarters while he, Sam and Nat searched for Bucky, he was a stone-faced emotional mess. 

He gave up trying to reach his back and leaned down to press his forehead against Steve’s head instead. 

“Honey, honey, hey. It’s gonna be okay. He’s back, right? What have you been worrying about since he disappeared? That you wouldn’t see him again, that he was hurt and in trouble, that he was never going to remember you. None of those things seem to be true, if he’s seeking you out like this.”

“Seeking  _ us _ out,” Steve corrected. The words sounded malformed and wet through his snot-clogged nose. “It’s  _ your _ house.”

“Well, I’m sure if SHIELD didn’t have a four-hour guard rotation on your old apartment primed and ready to shoot anything that looks like it could be him, he’d have shown up there instead. But we live in a world where your employers continue to be massive dicks even after rooting the nazis out, so international fugitives have to improvise a bit.”

Slowly, like a babbling brook freezing over, Steve managed to reign himself in. Tony sat there patiently, trying to be supportive, and wondered if this was going to be the sort of thing that they just didn’t talk about or not. Despite dating the man for nearly two years at this point, Steve had never turned on the waterworks like this before.

“I’m okay,” Steve said at last. “Let’s go. The faster we get there, the faster we can see him.”

Okay, looks like that was a  _ no _ on talking about this some more. 

Tony politely didn’t point out that Steve was the one who needed to take a pit stop, because he was a good partner like that. 

* * *

The person who met them at the door was definitely more Winter Soldier than Bucky Barnes. Had Tony been asked two years ago, before HYDRA reared its treacherous twenty-first century head, he’d have said that this grim, greasy-looking wraith lingering awkwardly on the shadowy end of the porch was some sort of ghost, or maybe a raccoon given human form. Definitely not the jaunty sergeant smiling brightly in the Smithsonian’s vintage propaganda reels. 

But he didn’t tell Steve that, of course. If he couldn’t see it for himself, then he was too deep in denial for anyone else to get through to him. 

Steve vaulted over the low-set door of the convertible before the car even came to a complete stop and sprinted towards Bucky like he was salvation on earth. Before he reached him, however, Bucky flinched and held out his hands in a  _ stop _ signal. Reluctantly, Steve jerked to a stop halfway up the porch stairs. 

Tony gave Bucky points for trying to communicate rather than fleeing or attacking. Nothing says stability like the ability to communicate under duress. 

If he were a better person, he’d leave them to their tender reunion. This was about  _ them _ , after all; he could at least have the decency to give them a bit of privacy. 

He slid out of the car with every intention of checking on the little robot lab he’d installed in the gardening shed on the other side of the house, but he ended up leaning against the hood of the car instead. 

This was the guy who’d landed Steve in the hospital for a solid week, after all, and if Steve wouldn’t defend himself  _ then _ , he wasn’t going to  _ now _ . 

Hey, that was actually a pretty good excuse. Pepper might even buy it if he slipped up and mentioned his murderous new houseguest. 

After a few excruciating minutes, during which Steve vibrated like a dog who desperately wanted to chase the critters in the bushes but couldn’t because he was on a leash, Bucky finally took a deep breath and gave Steve the  _ go ahead _ signal. 

Bucky didn’t move to meet Steve, but he didn’t back away either, which was all the encouragement Steve needed. In three strides he was wrapped around Bucky like one of those enormous ground sloths he saw in the natural history museum once. Bucky himself quickly disappeared from view behind the great muscled expanse of Steve’s back. 

_ Hold up.  _

Tony’s eyes narrowed. A sense of unease swelled in his stomach. Something wasn’t right with this picture. And not in a  _ my boyfriend is hugging the guy who tried to stab him  _ sort of way, but in a  _ geometric _ sort of way. The assassin from the recovered DC footage was bigger than the man currently trying not to drown in Steve’s sad-happy-relieved-guilty tears on his front porch. More solid. Roughly Steve-sized, with a torso shaped less like God’s perfect V and more like an old growth tree trunk and thighs he could sit on with space to spare. 

Steve should not have been able to block him so completely from view. 

But then Bucky patted Steve’s back uncertainly, and suddenly the whole thing was too wholesome to watch. Certainly too sweet to break up over the geometric improbability of their bodies. He decided to just let it go. 

He turned away from the sight of Steve lifting Bucky off the ground with the power of his hug and hurried off to see to the robotics lab.

* * *

The second he stepped off the final stair and into the lab, he was greeted by a chorus of electronic cheers. Two robots scuttled over to him at top speed, nearly knocking over a table full of tools in their haste to reach him. 

“Hey, whoa there-  _ oof!” _

One of the bots sprung into the air and slammed into his chest, just barely missing the arc reactor. Six articulated metal leg struts wrapped around his shoulders and upper chest in a hug, while the two grasping metal claws waved excitedly in the air above his head, clicking like salad tongs. The other robot plowed straight into his legs like an excited dog whose owner had finally returned home. 

The combined force of the two impacts forced him back onto his heels, where he teetered for a few seconds on the lifts in the bottom of his shoes before he finally overbalanced and tumbled onto the floor. 

“Yeah, yeah, good to see you too Buster, Shortstack. Daddy’s home,” he gasped from his spot on the floor. “Steve’s also here, just in case you want to assault him too.” 

The bots beeped at him in unison. 

“Come on guys, Steve’s good too. He just hasn’t been out here to meet you because he’s been busy Captain America-ing the world back into shape. He’s had to deal with  _ Nazis, _ Buster. Nazis! I promise, you’ll love him.”

Buster whined and extended the measuring tape in his “chest” so it wrapped around Tony’s legs like a lasso. 

“Okay, point taken. Maybe its a good idea if you wait to meet Steve anyways. He’s got a lot on his plate right now.”

_ Wasn’t that the truth.  _

He sighed, and shooed the two robots off him. “Alright, alright, back to work. I know you have jobs to do.”

They beeped amiably and skittered off into separate corners of the lab. Tony remained where he was sprawled out on the floor. 

“Hey Jarvis, is my boyfriend still crying a river on the porch?”

“No, Sir. Captain Rogers has taken Sergeant Barnes to the master bathroom with the intent to “wash up before bed.” They are currently deciding on shampoos. At Sergeant Barnes’ current decision-making speed, I estimate you have roughly two hours until they finish. Would you like me to relay a message?”

“Nah, that’s fine J. Just let me know if things start to go south, okay?”

“Of course, Sir.”

_ Bucky God Damned Barnes.  _

If he had had the foresight to plan ahead, Tony would have had a game plan ready by now. But he hadn’t, and so here he was. Lying on the floor of the workshop, wondering how much longer he was going to have Steve.

Steve had confided in him that he had been in love with Bucky once, back during the war. He’d told Tony because Bucky was dead and in the past, and it didn’t matter except because it was one more thing that Steve had had to mourn when he woke up in the twenty-first century. 

But now Bucky was alive, and Steve clearly still loved him. 

Tony wanted Steve to be happy. Of course he did. He just wanted Steve to be happy with  _ him.  _

But Tony wasn’t an idiot. He knew Steve wouldn’t be happy without Bucky. He hadn’t so much as smiled since learning what had happened to Bucky after he fell. 

So, solutions. How did he keep Steve happy  _ and  _ romantically invested in Tony?

The easy answer would be if Bucky just wasn’t interested in rekindling their epic romance. Somehow, Tony didn’t think that was terribly likely. Bucky had broken through seventy years of brainwashing and torture for Steve. Tony would be a fool to bet against a relationship that enduring. 

And what if Bucky was thinking the same thing? What if he looked at Steve and Tony’s relationship and decided Tony was a threat to what he had with Steve? 

“Ugh.”

He let his head fall back and hit the concrete floor of the lab. 

His chest ached, but for once it wasn’t the arc reactor’s fault. Pain from the arc reactor ebbed and flowed with his breathing. This ache was constant and unconnected to his body. 

For a moment, he pictured Steve leaving. He pictured Steve taking him to some secluded corner to break the news to him that he just couldn’t stay with Tony when his first and greatest love was here. He’d be a gentleman about it, tell Tony it wasn’t his fault, that they could still be friends. None of it would soften the blow. 

Well. Steve couldn’t break up with Tony for Bucky if Tony gave him Bucky on a silver platter. 

“Hey Jarvis?”

“Yes, Sir?”

“I’ve had a genius idea. Gather up whatever information you can find on the web about polyamory, synthesize it for me and leave it in a folder I can send to Steve if necessary. I think it’s time to open our relationship on a one-time basis.”

“Of course, Sir. Might I take this chance to remind you that it is generally agreed that when considering such an idea, one should not open the relationship because they feel insecure or bored with their current relationship, nor should they open the relationship in order to try to solve said relationship’s current issues?”

“Hey, I’m going in with my eyes wide open here! I am one hundred percent willing to share Captain Hotstuff with his Murderkitten.”

Jarvis’s silence felt rather judgemental, but that was okay. He’d come around.

“Okay then. I’m going to put in an hour or so on maintenance for the bots, then I’m going to bed.”

“For once, a healthy choice, Sir.”

* * *

The geometric problems persisted. 

When the next morning dawned and Steve had finally managed to turn off the waterworks, the three of them had breakfast together on the back porch overlooking the acres of conservation forest that made up most of the property. A low table rested in the sunny spot to the right of the door, and some mismatched chairs surrounded it like three old friends meeting for cheap wine and cheese. 

Steve cooked a mountain of eggs and a whole pig’s worth of bacon, and Jarvis instructed him on how to hook up the blender so he could make the fruit smoothies Tony took with breakfast since deciding that maybe martinis weren’t the best breakfast beverage for his mission-readiness. He made a blueberry one for Tony, a mango one for Bucky, and a kiwi one for himself. 

“You won’t believe all the fruits you can buy at the grocery store these days, Buck, and not just at the fancy ones. Can’t bring myself to look at the price tags, though. I know it’s just inflation, but it still gives me a nasty little shock every time.”

Bucky accepted his mango smoothie like it was a vial of volatile, poisonous chemicals. 

“I don’t like future fruit,” he said. “The bananas taste like lies.”

Steve launched into an explanation of industrial monoculture and how that related to disease susceptibility. It didn’t seem to improve Bucky’s thoughts on future fruit any. He listened with rapt attention just the same, though, barely so much as touching his fork, so it must have interested him. 

Tony sipped his smoothie and ate his eggs. Steve always made such fluffy scrambled eggs. It was like eating comfort. 

“And that’s what Tony uses this property for. He has another one a little bit north of here where he grows polyculture produce and does all sorts of experiments with soil and genes and stuff. There’s all these scientists there that are happy to explain it all.”

He abruptly found himself in the crosshairs of Bucky’s focus. 

“You’re trying to keep future fruit from getting sick and going extinct like the bananas did?” He demanded. 

“...Among other things, yes,” seemed like the best answer. 

Bucky nodded decisively. 

“Good.” He turned to look at Steve. “You picked a good future boyfriend.”

Steve did his best impression of a golden retriever who had successfully retrieved the stick.

“I did!”

“Wait a sec, did I just win his approval by throwing money at experimental farming?” He shot Steve his best  _ are you serious? _ look.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Bucky said solemnly. “Steve here says my enemy is industrial monoculture-induced genetic vulnerability, and that you’re fighting that. Therefore, you are my friend.”

He said it with such a straight face, Tony couldn’t be sure if that was his actual thought process, or if he was screwing with him. 

“It’s not me you should be talking to, then. I just fund it, and occasionally fix equipment. I never did learn to love the squishy sciences.”

Bucky accepted this with a shrug. 

“So, have you two had the  _ what are we gonna tell the Spy Squad _ talk yet? Because I’ve gotta know if I’m supposed to be calling up Director Hill to tell her we’re gonna need all hands on deck, or if I’m spending a couple of hours Natasha-proofing the security systems and letting Rhodey-bear know that I’m going to be lying to the government soon and he’s going to have to practice his straight face.”

Steve glanced Bucky’s way. 

“We didn’t, no. Last night was… we had other things we had to catch up on together.”

Tony had thought he had a lid on it. He honestly had. He’d already decided he was going to talk with Steve about him dating Bucky. 

But Steve’s words just then ignited a volcanic eruption of jealousy in the pit of his stomach. 

It was silly. Based on Jarvis’s updates last night, he could be pretty sure that most of what they’d discussed had been the pros and cons of each and every shampoo in Tony’s very well-stocked bathroom, with occasional forays into “where were you” and “can I hug you?” territory. Steve had come to  _ his _ bed last night (still crying, though they’d been happy tears), not wherever it was Bucky slept after finishing up his bath. There was no good reason for him to have such a visceral reaction. 

And yet here he was, desperately trying to clamp down on his jealousy before anyone noticed. 

“Well then, let’s figure that out, shall we? Better to decide on a course of action now than be left scrambling when your old SHIELD buddies come calling.”

“I don’t want to see anyone,” Bucky said quietly. “Not yet.”

“Okey-dokey, can do,” Tony said around another mouthful of Steve’s fluffy eggs. “But, just so you know, this house is really the only private spot on the property. I don’t live here most of the time. All those other scientists working on all that stuff we were just talking about? They  _ do _ live here, or at least a lot of them do. On the other side of the property, for the most part, but still.”

“I can stay here. I don’t mind being cooped up.”

“Are you sure?” Steve asked. He put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and Tony had to look away. “We can find somewhere else to lay low if you want.”

“It’s fine, Steve. I just need a little more time before I’m ready to start seeing normal people again.”

“Okay, great, sounds fantastic, I’ll upgrade the security systems.”

He smiled at the two of them and hoped it covered up the barely-leashed jealousy.

Looking at Bucky, the sense of geometric wrongness suddenly began welling up again. This time it only took a few seconds to locate the source of the wrongness. Something was wrong with Bucky’s flesh arm. 

It was too small. 

The assassin in DC had matching arms. If the metal one was bigger, it was only by a little bit. 

The man sitting a few feet away, listening to Steve regurgitate fifty-seven books about sustainability and ecological degradation while his eggs grew cold, was definitely the assassin from DC. Jarvis’s facial recognition software used variables too difficult to plausibly fake- the distance between each eye and the tip of the nose, the angles of the triangle formed by his nostrils and the highest point on his forehead, stuff like that. This man  _ was _ the assassin. 

And yet, his right arm was maybe half the size of the metal one. The length was fine, but the volume was all wrong. What had Bucky  _ done _ with all that rippling muscle since they last saw him?

Then Bucky shifted so that the rest of his body blocked Tony’s view of the thin little arm, cutting off his covert staring. 

* * *

After breakfast, he left Steve and Bucky to finish reconnecting and went to check on some of the projects going on at the other end of the property. 

He met and did a little basic maintenance on three robots before he finally ran into two of his scientists in residence, Rose and Fatima, near the stream that meandered around the souther edge of the property like a tangled strand of yarn. They discussed water samples and salinity tests for a few minutes before he left them to their work and continued on towards the soil lab. 

Dustin met him at the lab door and gave him a quick rundown of which replanting efforts had been successes and which had been failures and which ones they were still monitoring, then pointed him towards the arc reactor power station in the back that was supposedly having some sort of issue connecting to the server batteries. 

Tinkering with the arc reactor’s connection wiring filled two comfortable hours, and doing some light repairs on the other equipment that had started to go wonky filled another one. By the time he waved goodbye and began to amble back to the house, it was nearly noon. 

Steve was sketching on the porch when he returned. He ducked in for a quick kiss, then wriggled his way onto his lap. Steve helpfully moved his sketchpad to make room. Bucky was nowhere to be seen. 

“He was looking kind of tired, so I sent him off to take a nap,” Steve explained. “I guess he hasn’t had time to recover from being on the run yet.”

Tony settled back against Steve’s chest. 

“I might just follow his example.”

Steve laughed. His chest shook pleasantly against Tony’s back. 

“How’s the forest coming along?”

“Good. The northeastern bulrushes are doing well. The growth rate’s up by nearly twenty-seven percent over last year. And the arsenic levels in the soil are down an average of eighteen percent near the stream, always a plus. The evergreen replanting is still slow-going. And I’ve been informed that they reproduce better if they get set on fire, so. Need to come up with a safe way to do that. I didn’t actually run into Carla, but Rose said she’s still working on getting a genome sequence for her hemimastigote sample, and also that I should expect some pretty pictures in her next publication, so we’ve got that to look forward to.”

“You’ll have to show me when it comes out.”

“I will.”

A comfortable silence fell between them. The sun was high in the sky and so bright the old wooden boards of the porch seemed to glow. Birds sang from the trees, and the slightest breeze ruffled the leaves as it passed. Steve’s breathing was steady and deep, and Tony found himself almost hypnotized by it. His eyelids fluttered closed. 

Suddenly, something moved under his feet.

His entire body twitched like he’d been shocked with a stun baton as he snapped back to full awareness. Only Steve’s strong arm wrapped around his stomach like a seatbelt kept him from tumbling out of his lap. 

Something big was stirring under the porch. It was far too big to be a raccoon or a stray cat, big enough to hear its weigh shifting and the crumpled-paper sound of that weight coming down on the leaf litter and other organic debris that had ended up under there over the years. 

Was it a SHIELD agent? One of Barnes’s old handlers, come to drag him back to the burning wreckage of HYDRA? Something else? He hadn’t gotten to spy-proofing the place yet, but there was no way his existing security was so bad that someone had already tracked the man all the way here in less than a day.

His fingers were wrapped around the hidden edges on his watch, collapsible Iron Man gauntlet already engaged and ready to expand out, when Bucky emerged from underneath the porch, blinking in the sun and batting stray twigs and out of his hair with one hand. 

“How was your nap?” Steve called out to Bucky.

“Good. No dreams,” Bucky replied.

“I was just about to turn in myself. Tony was falling asleep just now, and this can’t be a comfortable position for that.”

“Are you trying to imply that your thighs and abs aren’t comfortable?” Bucky grinned. “Not sure I can agree with you on that one, pal.”

“Were you sleeping  _ under the porch?” _ Tony demanded as his brain caught up with the situation. “I have guest rooms, you know.”

Bucky hunched his shoulders.

“Feels safer under there,” he said quietly. “It’s dark, and it’s not an obvious spot. Harder to find me if someone came looking.”

If that wasn’t not the most pitiable thing Tony’s ever seen, he doesn’t know what was.

* * *

Tony was honestly kinda surprised that Steve joined him in bed that night without Bucky in tow.

“So, should I be investing in a bigger bed, or is Frosty going to maintain his own space so you can orbit between his room and mine?” He asked as Steve slipped under the covers and pressed up against his back. 

“What are you talking about, Tony?” 

“I’m talking about you and your long lost love reuniting at last! Romantic kissing in the rain, falling asleep together on the couch, being the cutest old married couple to ever grace the covers of whatever tabloid magazine manages to nab a photo of you first, all that good stuff.”

Steve’s arms snaked around Tony’s torso and pulled him tight up against his chest so that his words vibrated directly into Tony’s spine and diffused through the muscles of his back. 

“I’m not breaking up with you for Bucky, Tony. That would be a real shitty move, don’t you think?” 

“Wow, hey, pump the break-up-brakes, who said anything about us breaking up? No, you can’t break up with me. If you do I’ll have to try and win you back through a series of grand gestures that will probably backfire horribly and with an enormous blast radius, and your life will never know peace. I’ll skywrite you pathetic letters every day. It’ll be awful, you’d hate it, so let’s just not do it.”

“Okay,” Steve said slowly. “Then why did you bring up me dating Bucky?”

“Because I am the best boyfriend in the world, and I am going to let you, no,  _ help you _ woo your boo bear back so you can be disgustingly happy together and they have to update the Smithsonian exhibit with pictures of you two smiling in color so people can see what a happy ending you two got.”

“I… don’t follow.”

Tony twisted himself around in Steve’s arms so he was facing him, breastbone-to-arc reactor. 

“You’re going to keep dating me. While you’re dating me, you’re also going to get together with the man you’ve been obsessed with since he showed up. The three of us are going to live happily ever after and you’re both going to praise me for being such a genius that I gracefully avoided dumb relationship drama, which will totally make up for all the unrelated drama that ends up being my fault.”

Steve made a face like a dog whose favorite toy had been snatched away. 

“You want me to cheat on you?”

“It’s not cheating if I tell you to do it, Steve! You’ll just be dating two people instead of one!”

“That kind of sounds like cheating.”

“But it’s not! Kind of how like rift and riff sound alike, but are totally different words.”

Steve still looked dubious. 

“I promise, it’ll be fantastic, you’ll see. So, answer the question. Are you going to orbit between Bucky’s room and ours, or am I spending tomorrow ordering a bigger mattress so you two oversized lumps don’t accidentally squeeze me off the bed in the middle of the night when you flex in your sleep?”

Steve sighed. 

“Can we get a decide later? Bucky’s… not ready to sleep with other people around.” He made a huffing sound that was halfway between a chuckle and a sob. “He wouldn’t even come in the house. I’m pretty sure he’s sleeping under the porch.”

Tony winced. 

“Yeah, okay, we can decide later. In the meantime, though, how can I help you two get back together?”

Steve pressed a kiss to Tony’s forehead. 

“How about you let me take care of that? You’ve already given me permission, even if I don’t understand why. That’s more than enough.”

He paused, lips still pressed against Tony’s skin. 

“Does me dating Bucky mean that you’ll-”

“Oh no, nope, not a chance, I am a one-man guy. Monogamist through and through. Sorry, the sad raccoon eyes and the hobo hair style just don’t do it for me.”

He pressed a kiss to Steve’s cheek just to accentuate his point. His eyes were closed, though, and he missed his mark and kissed his nose instead.

“Then I don’t really understand what you’re getting out of this, Tony.”

_ The knowledge that you won’t leave me. Not having to find out if I’m second-best in your eyes. I want you to be blissfully happy, and I want that happiness to be with me. _

“The pleasure of knowing that you don’t have to choose between us. Now keep kissing me, I feel neglected.”

Their kissing got deeper and slower, until they each drifted off to sleep.

* * *

Tony spent the next morning upgrading the security system and setting up new false trails for INTERPOL’s Winter Soldier team to follow while discretely warning his lawyers to start preparing for a major criminal case. He didn’t mention Barnes by name, but if they were paying attention they’d know who he meant. 

When he emerged from the lab for a smoothie (with some vitamins crushed in it so he wouldn’t have to taste them), Steve and Bucky were out on the porch. They’d untied and removed all of the porch furniture cushions and pulled out all the picnic blankets, covering the floorboards in a soft, uneven carpet. Bucky sat leaning against the thickest cushion, taken from the old three-person couch shoved off in the corner. Steve’s face wasn’t visible, but the amorphous bulk of his body was curled up so that his cheek was probably pressed to Bucky’s thigh. The quiet murmur of Bucky’s voice disintegrated before it could fully reach Tony’s ears. 

Two tall glasses worth of a bright pink smoothie sat on a low table. One was dwindling towards empty, while the other was still full to the brim. 

“I’m sorry, Bucky, you must feel like this is some sort of inquisition. You haven’t even had a chance to drink your smoothie.”

Tony paused, hand on the refrigerator door. Like magnet needles righting themselves his eyes slid towards the two men just outside the sliding screen door. 

“Don’t worry about it, Steve. I’m not that hungry anyway.”

“I know, I heard you the first time. I didn’t make you eat the muffins, did I? But smoothies aren’t food, they’re a drink, and it’s hot out. You’ve gotta keep drinking to replace everything you sweat out.”

Bucky chuckled. 

“I know my serum’s not quite as good as yours, Steve, but sitting down in the shade isn’t exactly sweaty work.”

“Come on, Bucky, just drink the smoothie.”

“Is that an order?” Bucky asked. 

The words were playful enough, but Tony could swear there was a darker undercurrent there. Something clenched in his chest. All of a sudden he wished he could see their faces. Voices were too ambiguous for… whatever was happening right now. 

“If that’s the way you wanna play it, pal,” Steve laughed. “This is your Captain ordering you to drink your smoothie, Sergeant.”

Almost mechanically, Bucky reached over and grabbed the smoothie glass, lifted it to his lips, took a deep breath, tilted his head back and practically poured the smoothie down his throat. 

Light shone through the glass, letting Tony see the way the viscous liquid slid in a long, uneven mass down the side of the glass and waterfalled straight past Bucky’s lips. His whole body stayed almost comically still as he drank, not even moving his throat to swallow. It took nearly a minute for the whole oversized glass to steadily drain into his mouth. Only when the last of it had disappeared did he suddenly come alive again, taking a deep gasp of air and setting the glass back on the table. 

There was a moment of silence. Tony stared out the window at the back of Bucky’s head, trying to wrap his head around what he just saw. 

“Jesus, Bucky!” Steve said, echoing Tony’s sentiment exactly. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Bucky asked, voice dripping with faux innocence. 

“That thing you just did! When did you learn to do that?”

“Learn to do what?” Bucky sing-songed. 

“I didn’t even know your jaw opened that far. It was like you were one of those sword-swallowers or something.”

“Well, you did order me to drink it all.”

“I didn’t mean you couldn’t take a moment to breathe!”

“What, and miss the opportunity to show off how long I can go without air while I’m putting my throat to better use?” 

Bucky’s teasing tone turned decidedly suggestive, and Tony turned back to the fridge in time to avoid watching them start to make out. He couldn’t turn off his ears, however, so he still heard the sounds of lips sucking on lips and quiet sounds of pleasure. Quickly he started grabbing his vitamins from their little bottles above the fridge and crushing them into the pre-blended smoothies from the back of the fridge with his name sharpied on the side in Steve’s neat blocky letters. 

Looks like Bucky had been receptive to rekindling their wartime romance. 

It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable watching them together, of course. It was just that they’d been apart for so long, and had so much reconnecting to do, and Tony’s presence just complicated all that. They deserved a little privacy, and Tony should go back to the lab before the little knot of  _ something _ in his stomach got any more uncomfortable. He’d see Steve later, at dinner, and kiss him on the cheek and absolutely not be even a little bit jealous of Bucky Barnes. 

“Come on, Steve, let me show you what else that little trick is good for. You can block my throat for a good couple of minutes before I really need air. Wanna bet I can get you off without having to take a breath?”

Tony fled to the basement with his smoothie. 

* * *

When he resurfaced for lunch, Bucky had disappeared. Steve was waiting for him in the kitchen with grilled cheese sandwiches, fruit smoothies, and soup made from the most recent batch of the new drought-tolerant tomato strain. (He could tell because the soup was bright pink, just like the most recent batch had been.)

“Welcome back, Tony. Did you make progress on your projects?”

Tony accepted a bowl of soup from him and pressed a quick kiss to his chin. 

“Yep. I still need to test some things, but the new StarkPhone updates should be ready by the end of the week, and your new body armor will hopefully no longer have that stiffness problem after it gets wet. As soon as Jarvis finishes with the fabricator, you can try it on.”

“Thank you, Tony.”

“Will your freeze-dried friend be joining us?”

“He said he wasn’t hungry, and that if he changed his mind later he’d take care of himself.”

Tony wiggled his eyebrows. 

“Does that mean I get to sit on your lap while I eat this?”

Steve laughed. 

“Sure, Tony.”

* * *

After lunch, Steve asked to go see the experimental orchards on the west-southwestern side of the property. Tony agreed, on the condition that Steve “carry me there in those big, burly arms of yours, Handsome.” And then promptly remembered that Bucky was right there, and that this was not an excursion for two but for three. 

“It’s alright,” Bucky insisted with a mischievous smile. “Far be it from me to deny the inherent sensuality of Steve’s muscles holding you in place. I’m brainwashed, not brain-dead.”

Steve huffed and didn’t dignify either of them with a response, so of course they had to leer at each other as lecherously as physically possible. That scored a laugh out of him, and the light tension that had gathered in Tony’s chest seeped away. 

Steve did, in fact, carry him there. He alternated between a bridal carry and a sort of fireman’s carry that involved his hands getting intimate with Tony’s ass, which was always appreciated. Tony narrated the various projects they passed on their way there, and only occasionally got distracted by the feel of Steve’s muscles flexing underneath him. 

“And that is actually the very top of an underground project over by that tree. That one is only mine in execution, though, don’t ask me about the details. One of the students doing summer research here is really interested in how trees communicate with each other and is doing a bunch of studies of root networks and nitrogen-fixing bacteria and chemical signaling and all kinds of squishy-science stuff that just so happens to require nanobots. She just recently finished her first paper for publication. It should show up soon-ish, but she’ll talk about it for hours if you let her, so there’s no need to wait if you’re curious. She’s not here right now, obviously, but she’s here most days of the week.”

Steve gave the unassuming little metal sticks in the ground a cursory glance, but Bucky actually seemed interested. He drifted over to get a closer look at them, prompting Steve to stop and wait so he didn’t get left behind. 

“They’re so small,” he said. “How far down do they stretch?”

“Not too far, except for that one with the little red flag on it, that one goes down as far as the deepest root. The rest of them just need to be deep enough to penetrate the upper layers of soil.”

“Can I touch them?”

“Go ahead.”

He ran a metal finger gently down the sides of one of the shallow sticks. It made a faint sound, only barely audible from where Tony lay in Steve’s arms. His face was pensive and not-quite absent, like he was trying to sink his own consciousness down into the soil to get tangled up with the roots and settle into the slow, seasonal rhythm of the earth. 

Then he seemed to remember that Steve and Tony were there, and hurriedly stood up and jogged back to Steve’s side. 

Nearly half an hour had passed when they finally reached the orchard. 

The orchard was a sprawling, semi-orderly mess of trees and experiments. Greenhouses and sheds dotted the open areas between trees, with a line of larger greenhouses lining the far edge of the area, where the small creek served as a natural endpoint. Normally, Tony would have taken his time and lead the two of them on a leisurely stroll through each of the major experiments, highlighting some of the more outlandish results and babbling about all the different baby scientists who had done their first work here and how they were flourishing now. But today, he had Steve with him, so instead he started off by directing him towards the enormous frankentree near the entrance. 

“Now, this one is hardly groundbreaking, isn’t even an experiment really, but I want to get your opinion on it, Steve.”

Steve obediently scanned it up and down. 

“It’s got a great trunk. Much more interesting than some of those trees over there,” he nodded towards a roped off square of identical, straight-trunked juvenile chestnut trees, “but I’m not sure how it’s really different from a peach tree.”

“If that giant is supposed to be a peach tree, do it’s peaches come out normal-sized or basketball-sized?” Bucky asked. 

“It doesn’t look so big to me.”

“That’s because you’re a city boy with no sense for telling trees apart, Steve.” Bucky said. “This thing looks like someone put the Whomping Willow on steroids.”

“You say ‘city boy’ like we didn’t grow up together.”

“I learned a lot about Mother Nature while I was in Mother Russia.”

“What, so you spent your downtime learning all about trees?” Steve asked.

Bucky shrugged. 

“Spent a long time hanging out in trees waiting for targets to stroll past.” He paused. “Also, I’m pretty sure I shot a bunch of people from fruit trees not long after they finished programming me.”

Steve’s grip on Tony’s thigh had edged past  _ sexy _ towards  _ painful. _

“Well, I guess it’s not just a normal peach tree then.”

“It doesn’t even really look like a peach tree,” Bucky continued. “It looks like someone tried to incorporate every known stone fruit onto a single tree.”

“Ding ding ding!” Tony exclaimed. “You got it, Snowflake. It’s a fruit salad tree! Someone a while ago had the idea of grafting similar fruits onto the same tree, and the world has been graced with fabulous, frankenstein trees every since. This particular project was inspired by Sam Van Aken, the crazy artist behind the Tree of 40 Fruit over at Syracuse University. He had the idea to graft forty different stone fruits onto a single tree, so that it would keep ripening from July to October. It yields peaches, plums, cherries, almonds, apricots, and any other stone fruit you can think off, all at the same time. Or, well, at whatever time each of those things is supposed to be ripe. In the spring it looks like a colorful patchwork when all the different colored blossoms come out.”

Bucky twisted his head from side to side, eyes tracking along the branches like he was searching for seams. 

“So what did you do differently from this Van Aken guy, then?” He finally asked. 

“Well, he stuck to naturally occurring stone fruit.”

“Of course, I can’t imagine why he would limit himself that way,” Steve smiled. 

“I know, right? Why stop there?” He sat up, resting his entire weight on Steve’s forearms so he could reach Steve’s lips and give him a quick kiss. “There are some cooler models around here, ones that glow in the dark and grow hot pink plums and sparkly blue cherries, but this one is the oldest and grandest. I thought it would appeal to your artistic sensibilities.”

“Oh, so this was all a ruse to get me to draw for you?”

“Dum-E has more drawings than me, which is completely unfair. I’m the one you’re dating, so you should help me catch back up.” 

The afternoon sun glinted off the arm, abruptly reminding Tony yet again that Bucky was there, and that he should probably acknowledge that those two were either back together or headed that way. It was just good manners.

“And Rip Van Wrinkle Number Two over there is way behind,” he continued, hoping Bucky wouldn’t pick up on how slapped-on his inclusion was. “You’ve gotta start making up for the past couple years worth of drawings quickly, before Dum-E realizes he’s got new competition.”

Steve kissed him lightly on the cheek. 

“Unfortunately, I didn’t bring any art supplies with me.”

“Hmm. Terrible oversight, that.”

“We’ll just have to come back here again.”

“What a shame. I can’t believe you’ll have to carry me in those big old arms of yours to a beautiful orchard full of science projects.”

“Who said I was carrying you again?”

Tony ground his ass back against Steve’s palms. 

“Don’t act like you don’t enjoy it, honey. You’ll give Terminator over there the wrong idea.”

_ Are you trying to make him jealous? _ A voice in his head asked, question dripping with disgust, and all of a sudden he felt his good mood evaporate.  _ That’s a new low, even for you. Grinding your forty-year-old ass against Steve just because you know the only man that could ever be his physical equal is watching? _

Bucky’s laugh broke him out of his shame spiral. 

“No need to worry about that, Tony. I’ve got Steve’s number. He’d never pass up an opportunity like that, even if you asked him to carry you every day.”

It was kind of embarrassing how reassuring that was to hear from Bucky, even as a joke. 

“Thank you, Winter Wonder. Just for that, you get a purple peach.”

He scrambled down out of Steve’s hands and hauled himself up onto the lowest branch on the tree. It took a few tries for his shoes to find purchase on the smooth bark, but once he got his hands on the second-lowest branch he was able to pull himself up pretty easily. A few easy steps through the more densely-packed branches brought him to a pocket of fruit surrounded by branches that had already grown and shed their fruit. He began scanning the fruit for a just-ripened one.

A pretty one caught his eye. He tested the give of the flesh with his finger, then weighed it briefly in his palm. Satisfied, he gave it a gentle tug and pulled it off the branch. He cradled it against his chest to shield it from any stray branches that might whack it on his way down, then started his descent. 

He jumped the last couple of feet out of the tree, then offered Bucky the peach. 

Bucky accepted it carefully. The royal purple color of the skin popped nicely against the cool metallic silver of the metal arm. 

“Huh. It  _ is _ purple. I don’t know what else I expected, but I’m still surprised.”

“Can you eat it?” Steve asked. 

“Sure. It’ll probably taste like a peach, but no guarantees. Everything in the open-air areas are safe to eat, of course- I wouldn’t hand you something that might be poisonous or something- but we’re definitely still experimenting.”

A flash of sudden fear lit up Bucky’s eyes. 

“It’s okay, Bucky,” Steve said. “Tony won’t be offended if you spit it out.”

“If you’re so sure, then  _ you  _ eat it,” Bucky insisted, pushing the peach at Steve. “You’re the one who brought it up in the first place.”

“But Tony gave it to you, Honey.”

“I’m not going to destroy the first purple peach I ever laid eyes on, Steve.”

Steve opened his mouth to reply, but was cut off by a piercing alarm coming from his pocket. 

Tension washed through Tony even though he knew it wasn’t an Avengers Alarm. To the side he saw Bucky go tense as well, eyes wide and staring at Steve’s pocket. 

Steve fumbled hurriedly at his pocket, overlarge fingers missing the thin opening a few times before finally slipping in and grabbing the phone he only carried around with him because of possible emergency situations like whatever was going on now. He hit  _ accept call  _ and held it to his ear. 

“Hey, Sam. What’s the situation?” 

A pause. 

“I’ll be right there.” He ended the call and slid the phone back into his pocket. “It’s okay, guys. Sam just needs a little help cleaning up a SHIELD mess.”

“Should we come too?”

“It’s okay Tony, there’s no fight. It’s just a he-said, she-said situation. Another one of the old department heads might be-” he glanced at Bucky for a split second, “Hydra, and they need some people to corroborate some stories. Hopefully I’ll be back by dinner.”

“Less than that if you let Jarvis drive,” Tony said.

“Thanks.” He pressed a quick kiss to Tony’s cheek, then to Bucky’s. “See you soon.”

And then he jogged off back towards the house, leaving Tony alone with Bucky for the first time.

“So,” Tony said, “I guess the peach is yours?”

Bucky stared at it like it was radioactive. “Let’s save it for Steve instead.”

“I promise it’s not poison.”

Bucky huffed. “I don’t think you’d feed me poison. But I just ate lunch, so if I try and eat it now I won’t be able to finish it.”

That was a lie. Steve had said Bucky didn’t eat lunch.

He thought about calling him on it, but eventually decided to give him a pass. 

For now. 

“Alright, alright. We can save it for Steve. I’ll find some other fruit for you to try.”

* * *

The greenhouses were truly marvels of biological engineering, the sorts of places that should be memorialized in some sort of large-scale, fantastical painting. It was a pity Steve had been called away at the last minute.

Bucky took to them well enough even without Steve there to be his human therapy dog. The giant robot arms that occasionally descended from the ceiling or the floor like grasping zombie hands in a bad horror flick caught him off guard, but after the first tense couple of seconds he seemed to accept their presence. At the very least, he let some of the snake-about-to-strike stiffness seep out of his stance. 

“So, anything you want to try?” Tony asked casually. “We’ve got strawberries, blueberries, berries you’ve never heard of, berries that didn’t exist until the lovely scientists who work here created them…”

Bucky didn’t even pretend to look around or think about it. 

“That’s sweet of you to offer, Tony, but I’m really not hungry. Maybe some other time?”

“Sure thing.” 

Buster and Shortstack chose that moment to come scuttling over. Buster beeped curiously at Bucky, but ignored him in favor of doing circles around Tony’s feet. Shortstack, however, came up to Bucky and examined him a little closer. 

“Hello there,” Bucky said. “Who are you?”

“That’s Shortstack, and the one doing his best imitation of a dog over here is Buster.”

Shortstack beeped and snapped her claws at Bucky. Bucky took a small step back. 

“She wants you to let her look at your arm. She’s curious because she’s never seen a robot arm on a person. It’s okay, she’s not dangerous. She probably couldn’t even get you with those claws. They’re more for picking things up than anything else.”

Bucky nodded, then squatted down so he was a little closer to Shortstack’s level. He carefully extended his metal arm for her inspection, keeping all five fingers splayed out and elbow straight. She beeped happily, then grabbed his pinky finger with her claw and tugged it this way and that so her camera could look at it from multiple angles. When he flexed and made the plates ripple, she made excited noises and danced in place. Her insect-inspired legs made little  _ ping _ sounds as the tips hit the greenhouse floor. 

Through the whole meeting Bucky was steady and calm. If anything, he was indulgent of the little bot. 

_ Oh, _ Tony thought.  _ I could like this man. _

* * *

He showed Bucky around the rest of the greenhouses, with Shortstack and Buster tagging along despite Tony’s halfhearted reminders that they had actually jobs they could be doing. Bucky was attentive, asking questions about the different experiments and how Tony found the various biologists and botanists and chemists and geneticists who had come up with them. It was kind of nice to have an audience who was just curious about the science of it. (Tony loved Steve, but Steve just wasn’t a science kind of guy.)

Better yet, he totally indulged the bots. Within twenty minutes he’d let Shortstack convince him that she was tired, and had hoisted her up onto his shoulders for a piggyback ride. She whirred happily for the rest of the tour, waving her claws above her head like a little kid. 

Before they left, Tony handed Shortstack a basket to gather fruit in to take back to the house. She imperiously ordered Bucky about the greenhouse by waving one of her legs in the direction she wanted him to go, then had him lean down or lift her further up so she could carefully grab the fruit with her tong-claws. Tony occasionally broke in to direct Bucky to particular fruits that he wanted to have taste-tested.

Once the basket was full, Bucky put the bot back down and waved goodbye to her at the door. She waved back with her claws, then turned around and raced off to join Buster. 

“Ready to go back?” Tony asked as he reached down to pick the basket of fruit up off the ground where the bot had abandoned it. 

Bucky nodded and glanced at the darkening sky. 

“Let’s go see if Steve’s back yet.”

Hearing him say Steve’s name elicited jealousy, but only a tiny tendril, like a fern bud trying to unfurl its way through the leaf layer. Nothing like the raging inferno that had plagued him since Bucky’s arrival. 

“Yeah, let’s go see Steve.”

* * *

They returned with the basket full of fruit under his arm to find Steve waiting for them on the porch with three tall, full glasses of something light purple and so cold Tony could see the late evening sun gleaming off the condensation covering the glass. 

“Welcome back!” Steve stood to greet them. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming back.”

Tony felt Bucky’s metal fingers go rigid in his grasp for a heartbeat before relaxing again. He shot him a concerned glass. 

“Don’t like the thought,” Bucky muttered, voice low as a frightened mouse pressed to the ground, “Of not coming back.”

Ah. Of course. 

Steve saved him from having to say something comforting by leaping over the railing and jogging down to meet them. 

“How was it?” He asked, aiming his words at Bucky even as he wrapped his arms around Tony’s waist and pulled him flush up against his side. “Did he let you taste anything, or was it still ‘too early in the process?’ I’m almost starting to think the Serum will wear out and I’ll get old and frail before I get to taste the fruits of my boyfriend’s labors.”

Bucky shook his head. 

“No. But he said we could try some once you got home.” He nodded his head at the basket Tony was pressing up against his outside hip, just under Steve’s hand. 

“Is that so?” Steve turned his sunshine smile on Tony. “Am I finally going to get to taste a real banana?”

Tony shrugged.

“Probably not. I’m a genius, but even geniuses have to resort to trial and error sometimes, and these are squishier sciences than my usual. You’ll be the first to taste these strains, though. Hopefully they taste a little bit closer to what you remember than the supermarket ones.”

“We’ll take it, huh Bucky?”

“You go right ahead. I’m not eating anything the resident mad scientist says might not have all the kinks worked out yet.”

Tony laughed and danced out from under Steve’s arm to race ahead of them and set his basket down on a low table between the porch chairs. 

“Now, just keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you can just waltz into my labs and help yourself anytime you like, this is a special occasion. This is a landmark crop, and I want to hear your input on the taste. You hear me?”

Steve and Bucky followed him up the porch stairs. 

“Sure thing, Tony, we hear you. Now what’ve you got in that basket?” Steve said. 

“Sit down, and we’ll get started.”

Steve sat down comically fast, trying and failing to suppress a smirk as he looked up at Tony through his eyelashes. Tony slapped his shoulder in faux sternness, then leaned down to press a quick kiss to his ear. 

Bucky lowered himself into the opposite chair at a more sedate pace. Tony could feel those icy-blue eyes tracking their movements closely, but when he glanced over his face was the picture of studied calm. 

Tony settled into the middle chair, right in front of the fruit basket. 

“Alright, so we can start with bananas or with-”

“Bananas,” Steve said quickly. Bucky nodded quickly in agreement. 

“Alright. But keep in mind, the chances that any of these specimens taste like you beloved 1930s bananas is slim to none. Some of these aren’t even from the project to bring back your precious Gros Michels **.** So don’t go spitting them out when they don’t taste like you think they will, okay?”

“Okay, Tony. We get it.” 

Steve’s begging eyes had no business being so pretty. 

With a dramatic flourish, Tony reached into the basket and pulled out a banana. 

Like a dog sighting a squirrel, Steve’s eyes snapped to the yellow curve of the fruit in his fingers. Tony could have sworn his pupils dilated a little bit. It was enough to bring laughter bubbling up uncontrollably in his chest. 

“Come on, Cap, it’s not like it’s porn! If you keep staring at it like that, I’m gonna be jealous. Would any old vaguely phallus-shaped object do it for you, or are my bananas just special?”

He glanced over at Bucky, who wasn’t giving the fruit nearly the same level of frenzied attention as Steve was. 

“Has he always been this incorrigible?”

Bucky shrugged.

“Don’t take it too hard, Tony. Steve’s just goal-oriented, you know?”

Tony’s laugh erupted like a startled bird from a bush. 

“So the Terminator  _ does _ have a sense of humor! I was starting to get worried about you!”

“Come on, Tony, stop teasing,” Steve grumbled. “I’ll promise to suck you off afterwards if you’ll stop making jokes and let me taste it.”

Well, that sure stoked up a pleasant warmth in his belly. 

Tony glanced at Bucky out of the corner of his eye, quick as a darting rabbit, like he’d learned to do over the course of a young adulthood spent at society galas where he needed to covertly size people up out of the corner of his eye before actually talking to them. Was it okay for Steve to say that in front of Bucky? It probably was. They were the great American love story, inseparable even in the face of crazy science, world wars and time. Steve would know what to say or not say in front of Bucky. 

Also, Bucky had totally clocked him looking, so he should get on with it.

“Well, I can’t turn down an offer like that. Open wide.”

With three deft movements he peeled the banana and popped one end into Steve’s open mouth. Steve moaned and gave it one theatrical suck before taking a bite. 

His entire throat spasmed, shoulders jerking and cheeks bulging in an aborted attempt to spit it out. He closed his eyes and tried to swallow, but immediately started horking it up again. He slapped a hand over his mouth to keep his traitorous tongue from expelling the bite without permission. 

Tony threw down the rest of the banana and leaped to his side. He put his hands on Steve’s shoulders and started rubbing circles against the stiff line of muscle there. 

“Steve, Steve, it’s alright, I promise I won’t really be offended it you spit-”

Steve’s neck gave another shuddering protest, then let the bite pass. He shuddered in disgust, then slowly wiped his mouth on his wrist. 

“Well, I’m gonna have to give that one a one out of ten,” he said, looking up at Tony in sheepish amusement. 

Tony kissed his forehead. 

“Next time, just spit it out!” 

“But you told me explicitly not to do that!”

“I take it back, I take it back. I just didn’t want to hear how it wasn’t quite right, not watch you have a taste-bud aneurism. You’re not being scored on your ability to choke down disgusting lab experiments.”

“Really? Darn,” Steve chuckled. “I was sure I’d get a top score for that.”

Tony shoved him. 

“Here, since I did such a bad job picking, you choose the next one. Jarvis, note down that failure and send it to the lab. That strain’s no good.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Steve reached into the basket without looking and pulled out another banana, though this one had a blue peel. 

“That’s not a banana,” Bucky said.

Years of reporters trying to catch him off-guard was all that kept Tony from jumping a foot in the air like a startled cat. He’d been so absorbed in Steve, he’d forgotten Bucky was there. 

“Taxonomically, it is.” Hopefully answering on time was a good enough save. No need to make the man think Tony was  _ uncomfortable  _ around him. “Or, at least I think it still is. Plant phylogenetics delight in not cooperating with taxonomists. But the lovely botanists in my employ arrived at the fruit you see in front of you from the same species of banana as you ate way back when. This one isn’t one of the ones that’s supposed to taste like old times, though, so don’t get too excited.”

“It’s like a long blueberry,” he said, reaching out to trail one metal finger along its curve. Tony watched with idle fascination as the shiny digit skirted the smooth bottom end, then up the shiny blue peel to the top of the fruit where the a it formed a little blue starburst around the needle-thin stem. The metal grooves on his fingers didn’t leave a single tear in the fragile skin, though little darker-blue blotches remained where his touch had lingered. 

“It did end up going in a blueberry-esque direction, didn’t it? The skin is much thicker than a blueberry skin, though. A little thinner than your average banana, but only by a few millimeters.”

Steve’s fingers glided along the banana scant centimeters from Bucky’s. His big blue eyes sought out Tony’s, and Tony nodded. 

With barely-repressed glee he reached out and yanked on the stem. The skin around it split cleanly, and when he pulled a whole section down the length of the fruit came away. He economically peeled the rest of the fruit, revealing a minty-green banana inside. 

“For some reason all the viable strains keep coming out green like that, but believe me, I’d have made the inside red and white if I could. Those family-values advocacy groups would immediately denounce it as softcore porn, and they wouldn’t even be wrong.”

That one got a chuckle out of Bucky. 

“You want to try this one, Winter Wonderland? Seeing as Steve got to go first on the last one,” Tony asked. 

Bucky’s shoulders tensed a little bit. 

“No, that’s fine. From where I’m sitting, taking the first bite doesn’t seem like all that safe of a proposition. Steve just about sprayed that first bite all over you.”

“What, so you’re going to make  _ me _ take on all the risk?” Steve demanded. He reached around Tony to swat at Bucky’s thigh, making Bucky squeak and pull himself into a little pillbug ball. 

“Don’t be mad, Steve,” Bucky said. His voice was muffled by the fabric of his jeans where his mouth was pressed protectively into his thighs. “You’re the one who’s always charging into danger against orders. I’m just giving you the chance to do what you do best.”

Steve smiled at that, and it was like the sun was rising across his face. Tony was suddenly reminded of all those old religious paintings with the saints painted in such light colors that they seemed to glow. It struck him hard and low in the gut, so that he almost wanted to flinch away from it, he liked it so much. 

In that moment, he knew that he couldn’t tell Steve what he’d been noticing. 

Steve had gone through hell to drag the love of his life back to the land of the living. He’d burned down government agencies, cut his way through dark, multi-layered conspiracies that went decades deep, and endured Bucky’s own attempts to kill him, just so that he could have this right here. 

Something was wrong with Bucky, but Tony just  _ couldn’t _ ruin this for Steve. 

Which meant he was going to have to deal with it himself. 

* * *

The first time he tried to talk with Bucky about it was that evening, after they’d finished taste-testing the fruits. Or rather, after Steve had finished testing them. Tony had stopped offering them to Bucky in order to avoid a confrontation with Steve there to witness it. 

After checking over the data before sending it off to the lab (of the three Gros Michel strands he’d had Steve try, only one had been close to what he remembered, so at least they had a clearer direction to go in now), he went looking for Bucky. 

He found him in the living room, staring at the pictures on the mantle, most of which prominently featured Steve and Tony being disgustingly affectionate in public. Hmm, now that he thought about it, he should probably start getting some pictures of Bucky and Steve put up, too, to balance it out a bit. Must be awkward to be the one whose not in any of the happy pictures, even if it’s not like that was anyone’s fault. 

“Hey, Snow-”

Bucky whirled around, knives already in hand. 

Tony stumbled back and held up his hands. 

“Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to bite. I just noticed something, well, I actually noticed it a while ago but that’s not the point- the point is, I noticed something I thought we should talk about.”

_ I’m just going to interrogate you about something you’re probably anxious about. _

Bucky looked him up and down, made a face, and made the knives disappear back to wherever he’d had them stashed on his body a minute before. 

“Sorry. Startled me.”

“Yeah, no, I get it. No blood no fowl, right?”

“What is it you wanted to talk about, Tony?” 

He sounded like he knew what Tony might be about to say, but was really hoping he was wrong. 

“So, I’ve noticed you haven’t been eating. I’m hurt; I put a sticky note on the fridge to remind me to set three places at the table, and then you just push your food around?”

“Steve sets the table.”

Tony waved his words away. 

“Details, details. Don’t think I’m going to let you distract me from the fact that you won’t touch my cooking-”

“Steve cooks.”

Bucky’s lips twitched like a smile was trying valiantly to break through his nervousness. It didn’t quite pull it off. 

“Alright Mr. Smartass, have it your way. Why won’t you eat the food Steve labored over the hot stove all evening to put on your plate?”

“The kitchen is the most heavily air-conditioned room in the house, and half of everything Steve makes is some sort of soup from a slow-cooker. He barely spends any time at the stove at all.”

If was so cute, in a mildly annoying sort of way, that Bucky thought he could use avoidance tactics on  _ Tony Stark, _ king of deflection. 

“So you don’t deny that you haven’t been eating?”

Bucky looked like nothing so much as a hunted deer that had just taken a fatal stumble. That face went straight to Tony’s heart and embedded itself there like one more piece of shrapnel. He tried to convey  _ this is uncomfortable and awful for me too  _ with his eyes, but Bucky was avoiding eye contact like it was a nosy reporter that had caught him in public. 

Bucky’s mouth stayed firmly shut, as though if he stayed quiet long enough Tony would just give up and walk away. 

Silence was no match for Tony’s powers of provocation. 

“Is this to get back at Steve? Are you mad at him for failing to catch you when you fell off that train, or something?”

_ “No!” _

Bucky whirled on him like he’d just implied he kicked puppies for fun.

“Then why are you doing this?”

“I’m not doing anything wrong!”

“Is this some weird brand of self-flagellation, then? Do you feel like you need to be punished?”

Bucky’s jaw snapped shut, and he glared defiantly at Tony like he was some charging bull he thought he could stare down. 

“Look, okay, I get it. Everything’s awful and your body’s rebelling and food sounds like the worst thing imaginable right now. But not even the Super Serum can keep you going forever. Did you see how much Steve ate after that attack on the lab? You could feed a family of four for a week with all the food he put away. Heck, you’re from the Depression,  _ you _ could probably stretch it even further.”

Bucky still didn’t look at him. 

“The point is, the Serum is a scientific miracle, but so are space rockets, so is  _ my suit _ , and you know what all of these things need?  _ Fuel. _ Now, before you ask, no, I won’t implant an arc reactor in your chest, it won’t help. It turns out people and machines need different types of fuel. Awful, I know. But people need food.  _ You _ need food, or else your body’s going to start cannibalizing itself.”

Bucky looked up at him for the first time at that, and his expression couldn’t have screamed  _ I’m good with that _ any louder if he’d had a microphone and big enough speakers to shake the ground. 

Well, that made things trickier. 

“Come on Frosty, don’t tell me you  _ want _ to starve yourself to death while Steve watches. That’s gonna be ugly, and he doesn’t deserve that.”

That brought the fire roaring back into Bucky’s eyes pretty damn fast.

“Leave Steve out of this,” he hissed. He sounded like an irritated possum. Tony was unmoved. 

“You better believe I’m bringing him into this. What, do you think he won’t  _ notice _ anything?”

“He hasn’t noticed anything yet,” Bucky muttered. 

“Maybe he hasn’t. He’s definitely going to notice when you collapse one day. He’ll notice when your hair starts falling out, and your gums start bleeding and you get sick from a thousand different vitamin and nutrition deficiencies. And what are you going to do then?”

“It’s not Steve’s problem-”

“That’s a dumb argument and you know it. Do you honestly think the thought ‘oh, that’s not my problem, I don’t have to intervene’ has ever occurred to Steve ‘Fight Me’ Rogers?”

Bucky seethed, but didn’t reply.

“Look, you don’t strike me as a cruel guy. What makes you want to make Steve watch in agony as your body wastes away? Why do you want to make him watch you fall all over again, but over the course of weeks instead of all at once?”

“I don’t want that.”

“Then why?”

Unfortunately, it seemed Bucky caught on faster than the average board member that talking just got him into more trouble. He glared at Tony in silence.

“Look, I have no space to judge you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I used to be called the Merchant of Death, you know that? People still drag that one out every once in a while too, it’s not like it’s ancient history.”

Bucky raised an exaggeratedly dubious eyebrow. 

“No, really. A lot of people died because of my past mistakes. If there was someone who deserved punishment, it was me. I’m not like Steve, talking out his perfect ass about forgiveness and justice, okay?”

“It’s not about punishing myself,” Bucky ground out. The words seemed to pain him as they slipped between his teeth, as though they were made of gravel instead of air. More tellingly, they lacked the fire and conviction of his denials about it having to do with wanting to punish Steve. 

“Then  _ why?” _

Bucky’s mouth opened, but no words came out. His chest heaved like he was drowning on dry land, and Tony could pick out barely-there muscle twitches as he fought not to clench his right fist. The metal arm rippled like pond water in a strong wind, as though it was receiving contradictory signals- half his brain telling it to prepare for a fight, the other half telling it to stay down and relax. 

The sight made his chest feel tight and heavy, like he was wearing a powered-down Iron Man chest plate and having to support all the weight himself. It was too easy to picture himself in Bucky’s place, knowing the answer to people’s interrogations in his bones but not in his mind, trapped in a self-destructive spiral that could start producing collateral damage at any moment. The feeling of being trapped, of knowing he shouldn’t couldn’t escape and  _ shouldn’t _ escape without facing the hard truth- it wasn’t a nice one. 

But couldn’t let that paralyze him when he had a job to do. 

“Is it leftover conditioning? Is it an orders thing? Do you just not feel hungry anymore? Do you remember how to swallow? If they fed you via tube, I know some great physical therapists for stroke victims that can teach you how to swallow again. It’s a remarkably complicated muscle movement, you know? Really hard to consciously do it, if you’ve forgotten how.”

For a second, he saw his words land. Not quite dead on, but he’d hit on  _ something. _

Then Bucky was tearing past him, vaulting out the window, and disappearing off into the woods. 

The determined anger flowed out of him, and he slumped in on himself. 

“Well, that could have gone better,” he sighed. 

* * *

The next morning, Bucky was back and all small smiles and casual arms around Steve’s shoulders like nothing had happened. 

He was sitting on the porch with one of the hundreds of history books Steve was always reading in order to catch up on what he’d missed open on his lap when Tony followed Steve down the stairs to start making breakfast. The small squeak of Steve’s sleep-heavy stride on a creaky floorboard made him look up and greet them good morning. Steve froze for a second, indecision written all over his face, before he greeted Bucky back with equal warmth and asked how he’d slept and nodded happily when Bucky lied with a smile about how nice Tony’s beds were. 

So that was how this was going to go. 

Tony hung back in the kitchen, watching them figure out how best to lie to the other. Bucky had scrounged up a new hoodie at some point, a size too big and baggy enough to hide the way his torso was shrinking around the foundation of his ribs. Steve told him it looked comfy, and asked where he’d found it. Bucky demurred, and Steve backed down so quickly and naturally Tony almost asked Jarvis to make sure he hadn’t been replaced by an LMD at some point in the last few hours. 

Was this how it felt for other people when they watched  _ him _ deflect instead of bringing up serious issues because he’d rather self-sabotage than make himself vulnerable? God, he needed to apologize to Pepper and Rhodey for putting up with this constantly. 

Not that he was going to stop doing it, of course. Like hell he was going to tell Steve that Bucky wasn’t eating. 

* * *

After breakfast, which Bucky once again managed to wriggle out of eating, Tony retreated upstairs to his and Steve’s room and called the best-qualified person he knew to dispense advice about what to do when you wanted to help someone who was in the process of self-destructing. 

Rhodey picked up on the third ring. 

“Tony, what’s up? Is something on fire, or did you just miss me?”

“Honeybear, light of my life, I need your sage council.”

Rhodey’s laugh sent a little wave of calm rippling through Tony’s muscles. Why hadn’t he called Rhodey as soon as he knew there was a problem? Just hearing his voice was comforting. 

“Do you need my advice, or do you need me to fly out to wherever you are right now and be your backup?”

“Well, while the dulcet tones of your voice are reason enough to want to call you up, I have also suddenly found myself in a difficult situation. One that I’m normally on the other end of.”

“What’s this  _ difficult situation?” _

“So, remember when I texted you that we’d found Barnes?”

“Yes,” Rhodey said, suddenly wary as a mother bear whose cub had wandered a little too far away. “I remember. You told me he seemed ‘remarkably non-stabby.’”

“Right. So, I couldn’t help but notice that the guy had lost a lot of weight. Like, enough to reshape his entire silhouette. And Steve just doesn’t seem to notice.”

“Does he, like, hide in the woods while you guys eat or something? Because I remember back when you had to go back on the chlorophyll diet for a while, after that killer robot broke your ribs and your reactor casing got banged up. Steve was like a dog with a bone about making sure you stayed healthy and recovered. Somehow I just can’t seem to picture him forgetting to feed the man he burned down the intelligence world to save.”

Tony shrugged. 

“I mean, he sits down to eat with us. Steve makes him food. He just doesn’t eat it. Well, except for this one time, but that time was definitely not normal. He downed an entire tall glass of Steve’s Smoothie of the Day without even pausing to breathe. Just poured it straight down his throat. But other than that, I haven’t seen him eat a bite.”

“And Steve missed this?” Rhodey said skeptically.

“He laughed and said something suggestive about how Bucky used to take really long drinks like that to get him all riled up back in the forties, and then I think they went off and had sex while I reviewed the creek salinity data.” Tony licked his lips at the camera, just to hear Rhodey gag theatrically. 

“You definitely didn’t need to tell me that last bit.”

“Since when was creek salinity data too filthy for your hardened Air Force ears?”

“Oh, are you going to pretend you don’t know which part I’m talking about? The genius doesn’t know whether I’d be more upset to hear about the details of your boring conservation data or details about your kinky sex life?”

“Who said anything about kinky? I wasn’t even there, Rhodey, I just heard Steve moaning-”

“Nope, I don’t want to hear it. What I want to hear is why you haven’t taken these concerns to  _ Steve? _ You’ve never had a problem pointing things out to him before.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

Rhodey gave him a distinctly unimpressed eyebrow-raise. 

“Look, you’re not sleeping with him-”

“I should hope not.”

“-so you don’t understand just how devastated he was when the whole HYDRA-tortured-Bucky-for-decades thing came to light. You know how he does that whole emotionally-repressed, patriotic-stoicism-and-determination face that he pulls out when he’s upset and doesn’t feel like he can do anything about it but keep punching? The one they always love to run on TV whenever there’s a news story about him? Well, he was making that face when the two of us were alone eating crappy hospital jello while we waited for the Serum to get him back on his feet again. He made it in his sleep. In the fucking shower. I thought it had just stuck that way or something. Or maybe he’d just burned through all of his emotions and just wasn’t going to have any anymore.”

And god, had that been a terrifying couple of days. 

“And then he finally got out of the hospital and had some sort of emotional breakdown at 2 a.m. a few days later, and that was even scarier! And then the next morning all of a sudden he’s the Man with a Plan again.”

“If I remember correctly,” Rhodey broke in, “his  _ plan _ was just to blow up HYDRA bases with extreme prejudice and threaten HYDRA-sympathizing Congressmen on live television.”

“I could barely convince him to eat and sleep, let alone do an activity that wasn’t directly related to finding Bucky.”

“So I’m sure he’d be one hundred percent onboard with giving his new boyfriend all the help he needs. Tony, I’m just not seeing the problem here.”

Tony sighed. It sounded so  _ self-centered _ when he said it out loud.

“I just got Steve back, Rhodey. He’s happy. He makes breakfasts and serves them out on the porch. He finds art shows in the newspaper and decides to go. He’s back to  _ normal. _ If Bucky-Bear wants to tell Steve what’s up, okay, whatever. That’s his prerogative. But I’ll fix this myself before I’ll let Steve go on another rollercoaster of depression over Bucky.  _ So, _ how do I fix it?”

Rhodey groaned on the other end. 

“Tony, I promise you, I’m not a nutritionist or a therapist. What can I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?”

“I don’t know, I’m just sticking to my formula! I run into a situation that can’t be solved by building a robot, I blunder around for a few days and then I call either you or Pepper, whichever one of you I call is horribly judgmental about my life choices but gives me life-changing advice anyway, I apply your advice to the robot or whatever that I tried to make to fix the problem, there’s explosions everywhere and the day is saved, probably with either you or Pepper showing up in the eleventh hour to help bail me out.”

“Oh, okay, here’s some advice for you:  _ don’t build a robot to fix Barnes’s eating disorder. _ That is a terrible idea, and I guarantee it won’t work. Also, don’t blow anything up. Blowing things up will not help your boyfriend’s new boyfriend get back up to normal weight.”

Tony smiled, glad that Rhodey couldn’t see his shit-eating grin over the phone. 

“First of all, I’m pretty sure they were together back in the forties, which would technically make  _ me _ the new boyfriend. Secondly, come on, Platypus, this formula is tried and true!”

“I swear to God, Tony, if you build an eating disorder robot and it makes something explode, I will  _ not  _ come help you. I’ll call Pepper and tell  _ her _ not to help you either. You will only see me in your dreams, where I will physically manifest so I can beam my disappointment directly into your brain.  _ Do not build a robot to solve this problem.” _

“Okay, okay, I hear you. But that was my only idea, so it’s your turn now. Come on, give me some ideas.”

“Maybe you could talk to him. It’s not like you can avoid him forever if he’s dating Steve.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Honeybunches. I swear to god, that man could share in a studio apartment with me and I wouldn’t even know he was there unless he wanted me to. Even Jarvis has to ask him to wave his metal arm around so he can find him sometimes.”

“But you do see him on a regular basis. You wouldn’t have known he’s been loosing weight if you never saw him. So have this talk with  _ him, _ so I can go back to work.”

Tony fake-pouted. “Are you saying you don’t like it when I call?”

“Of course not, Tones. I’m always happy to hear from you. I just think I shouldn’t have to tell you not to try and solve eating disorders with robots.”

“Okay, okay, I promise I won’t build him a robot stomach or anything.”

“That’s all I needed to hear. I’ll see you soon, okay Tony? I’m on leave in two weeks or so, I’ll come on down and visit you then.”

“Sounds like a plan. Love you bunches.”

“Love you too, Tony. Bye.”

The phone disconnected, leaving Tony alone once again with the problem that was Bucky Barnes. 

* * *

When Steve joined him half an hour later, Tony still hadn’t thought of a good plan beyond cornering Bucky and saying “I noticed you literally never eat” while shoving food in his face, which wasn’t much better than his last attempt, and that one had failed miserably. 

“You look like you’ve been thinking,” Steve observed as he joined Tony on the bed. “Did something happen with one of your projects?”

Tony turned over so his face pressed against Steve’s big, beautiful chest. 

“No, I’m just trying to figure out if I can squeeze another one in on the creek without disrupting any of the other ones already set up there. I got a really great proposal from some grad student in Vermont, and I’d really like to invite them out and have them run it here, but I don’t want to screw up anyone else’s data either.”

Steve ran his big, gentle fingers through Tony’s hair. He arched into it like a cat.

“How about you nap on it?”

Tony snorted. “That’s just your transparent attempt to try and make me catch up on sleep before I have to go back to my real job.”

Steve hummed. “Maybe so. Is it working?”

“Mmm, it just might be,” Tony sighed. Steve was warm, and his Bucky Problem was too nebulous for his mind to get a firm grip on it. Maybe Steve was right, and a short nap would help. 

Thirty seconds later he was dead to the world, beard lightly scratching Steve’s chest with each breath. 

* * *

“Steve, I need you to help me bring the mattresses down from the guest rooms.”

Steve looked up from his easel, where a half-formed painting of Tony and Bucky sitting under the Frankenstein fruit tree from their trip out to the orchard sat.

“Sure thing, Tony. If you want, I can just carry the whole bed down too. That way you won’t have to take it apart and put it back together again.”

“That’s okay, leave the frame where it is. I just want the mattress.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. 

“What are you planning to do with just the mattress?”

“This state of affairs has gone on long enough, and I won’t be tolerating it anymore. Your boyfriend has been sleeping on the ground under my porch since he got here. My perfectly good guest rooms have been left empty and unused while the good sergeant sleeps under my porch like some sort of lost raccoon. If we can’t get him to sleep in a real bed, then we’re going to do the next best thing.”

He turned and headed for the upstairs guest suite, whose queen sized mattress was just a little too awkward for him to manage by himself. 

Steve got one end, and Tony took the other. Lifting together, the mattress was light as a feather. They still had to walk slowly to keep it from unbalancing and falling out of their hands. Even Steve’s impressive arm-span wasn’t quite long enough to get a grip on both corners of his side, so they leaned it agains the wall whenever they could to keep it upright. 

Opening the sliding door took some finagling, since neither of them really had a free hand, but at last Steve managed to slide it far enough open for him to slip through. Once they were out on the porch, they carefully stepped down to the mossy ground cover “lawn” that separated the porch from the forest. Neither of them had put on shoes on their way out, and the springy moss felt soft between Tony’s toes. 

“Bucky?” Steve called into the man-sized opening leading under the porch. “Can we come in?”

Bucky emerged silently from the dark like an owl swooping into the moonlight. He gave the mattress two quick owl-blinks.

“What are you guys doing with that?”

“If you’re okay with it, Tony thought we should make the porch a little more comfortable for you,” Steve explained. “Make it a little cozier in there.”

Bucky blinked again, then stood aside to make room for the mattress. 

First Steve then Tony ducked through the hole and entered Bucky’s hideaway. They had to contort the mattress a bit to get it through the irregularly shaped hole, and Tony scraped the back of one hand trying to push his end through, but in the end they managed it. Once they were through it was difficult to see well enough in the dark to find a good spot to set it down. Bucky steered them deeper underneath the porch, possibly underneath the house itself before finally telling them they could set it down. 

Once they’d deposited the mattress, Tony had to clamber back outside in order to stand up straight. The porch had not been designed to accommodate a fully-grown man standing up under there. 

His back tinged painfully as he straightened out. He grumbled and rubbed his fingertips against the base of his spine to try and alleviate the ache. 

“I don’t know how you do it, Bucky. I was in there for barely a minute and all the crouching is already hurting my back.”

“It’s the Serum,” Bucky and Steve replied in unison. 

After the mattress came the tarp to put it on, then the pillows, plundered from various couches and other guest rooms and the blankets and comforters from closets and the extra sleeping bags and the old futon Tony’d forgotten he had out here. Bucky watched the procession of soft things first with confusion, then with a steadily growing excitement. Soon he was taking blankets out of Tony’s hands before he even finished shimmying his way through the hole and scurried off to add it to his growing nest. 

When the flow of blankets out of the guest rooms began to slow and Bucky’s nest had grown big enough to accommodate an Avengers-wide orgy, the three of them collapsed into it and groaned. 

“Those stairs just take it out of me,” Tony whined. “What was I thinking, putting so many guest rooms on the second floor?”

“Thank you, you guys,” Bucky said from somewhere to Tony’s right. “It feels like I’m lying on a marshmallow.”

There was just enough light, now that his eyes had adjusted somewhat, to see the pure happiness on Bucky’s face as he rubbed the soft material against his face. 

He heard the tiny whirs of the servos in the arm recalibrate the plates as Bucky wrapped one of the larger blankets around the three of them so that they were all pressed together like peas in a very soft pod. 

Tony’s last thought before slipping into an afternoon nap down there in Bucky’s new nest was a vague sense that he should have done this sooner. 

* * *

A week later, Tony finally snapped. 

“Jarvis, what’s the best way to abduct a Super Soldier without taking a metal fist to the gut?”

“Shall I ask Sergeant Barnes to clear his calendar for the day and meet you in the kitchen?”

“That doesn’t sound like an abduction plan to me, but sure, let’s try it your way.”

Jarvis fell quiet for a moment as he relayed the invitation to Bucky. 

“Sergeant Barnes has agreed, and will meet you in the kitchen in an hour.”

“Great. Fantastic. Okay, place an order for something with so many calories you’re obligated to warn your doctor that you ate it. Is there a good pizza place anywhere near here? Oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever spent enough time here to remember the good takeout places.”

“There are three, Sir. One of them offers a ‘Plenty for All’ Package, which includes two large pizzas with ‘special’ toppings, a liter of soda, a local variety of salty breadstick basket, and an optional salad.”

“What does ‘special’ mean here?”

“Several varieties of fish, including anchovies, salmon, tuna, swordfish, rockfish, trout-” 

“What, is this a seafood-themed pizza joint? You know what, just order something extravagant, okay? And  _ lots _ of calories.”

“Done, Sir.”

“Perfect. Yes to the salad, anything’s fine for the soda but make sure it’s not something red. Cherry-flavored anything is out. See if you can double the breadsticks.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Do they do delivery, or is it pickup only?”

“Delivery is offered only with an exorbitant fee.”

“Pay it, have it here in fifty-five minutes.”

Angry energy pulsed under his skin. It wasn’t directed at anything in particular, which was inconvenient. Steve regularly punched his feelings away- that sounded like a winning strategy just now, but he didn’t know how to punch The Creeping Sensation of Helplessness in the Face of Impending Tragedy or The Frustration of Watching Bad Things Repeatedly Befall Someone Who Doesn’t Deserve Them. His muscles twitched and tensed with the desire to leap up and find Bucky so he could fix this  _ now _ , pizza wait-time be damned. 

“What’s he doing that’s going to take a whole hour? I’ve seen him race Steve to the mailbox and come back in under ten minutes. I have to  _ drive _ to that mailbox, J. The man’s not slow.”

“Sergeant Barnes is with Captain Rogers. The Captain is applying the oil prescribed for his shoulder scarring.”

“And that’s going to take a whole hour?”

“Sergeant Barnes’s scarring is severe and extensive.” Jarvis paused for a beat. “And neither of them are wearing clothes.”

“Oh, I see how it is.”

Images of Steve lounging on a bed of pillows, naked and radiant and reaching for him with oiled-up hands danced before his eyes. Yeah, Bucky has the right idea, and was in fact a model of restraint. He’d want far more than an hour if their places were switched. 

For the first time, he didn’t feel so much as a flicker of jealousy. 

* * *

Bucky arrived in the kitchen exactly one hour later, silently slipping through the door like a cat. Tony didn’t realize he was even there until he happened to look up and see him there, loitering awkwardly in the shadow of a tool shelf. 

“Bucky! I should put a bell on you, keep you from sneaking up on me like that. I have a heart condition, you know.”

A small smile slid shyly across Bucky’s face. It looked like he had to consciously coordinate his lips to achieve it. 

“But it’s so fun to watch you jump.” The words came out smooth and confident, but his smile stayed small and anxious. 

“So, okay, I wanted to ask you something, see what your forties sensibilities had to say about it. Is this a pizza?”

He placed one of the two pizzas Jarvis had ordered on the counter.

“So, is it still a pizza if you put fruit on it?”

Bucky started at the pizza box Tony dropped in front of him with open bewilderment, like it contained a complicated math puzzle instead of food. Then, with the sort of slow, skittish movements of a beginner trying a complicated-looking origami creature for the first time, he opened the box. 

Inside was a large circle of something thin and bread-like, topped with cheese that had melted into a thick, greasy blanket. Thumb-sized slices of pineapple had been pressed into the cheese at regular intervals, and would have blended in perfectly were it not for the occasional circle of pepperoni breaking up the camouflage-convenient cheesy background. 

Bucky stared at it long and hard and sort of stupefied, like Tony had arranged the toppings to spell out nuclear launch codes. 

“I don’t remember pineapple being something you put on pizza,” he finally said. “Is there a reason they started doing that? Was it because pizza makers discovered that tomatoes are really fruits, not vegetables, and that inspired them to use other fruits too?”

He offered this theory the same way he might present a field observation on a mission where he was giving his own input to whoever was calling the shots. Did that mean he saw this as a mission, and Tony as his superior officer? If so, he should probably run and get Steve. Steve made a much better superior officer; he could order you to take your clothes off  _ on the double _ and sound sexy. It always came out sounding ridiculous when Tony tried to do it. 

He should make sure to slip that into their little pizza conversation. Bucky undoubtedly knew all about Steve’s sexy Captain powers back during World War II, but he might have forgotten during the intervening years as HYDRA’s iced assassin. 

“You know, I have no idea. Hey J, why’s pineapple on the optional toppings list?”

“There are conflicting accounts, Sir, but the most common one seems to be that a Canadian pizza shop first started selling pizzas with pineapple on them in 1962 as an experiment. While controversial, it became a successful enough topping to continue selling, and remains a major topping today.”

“Hey, so this post-dates you I guess. It’ll be a brand-new, twenty-first century experience. Unless HYDRA force-fed you pineapple pizza, which now that I think about it seems like the sort of dick thing they’d do-”

“They didn’t.” Bucky said, and Tony’s heart just about stopped. 

Bucky’s face had gone totally blank. It wasn’t even like looking at the Winter Soldier; at least the Soldier had been focused. Bucky’s face now was just a complete and total blank. 

_ Shit shit shit. Holy fuck he was not cut out for this! _

“In the beginning, they’d feed me people food. But it kept reminding me that I was a person. Taste- and scent-memory are supposed to be pretty potent, I guess.”

He shrugged, and a little calm contentedness began to break through the expressionless void. Except Tony had  _ seen _ what he looked like when he was calm and contented, and compared to the expression on his face when he was hanging out with Steve this contentedness was as fake as plastic food for restaurant window displays. 

“So they started feeding me intravenously instead. Or sometimes with tubes, when they had to feed me in a hurry or hooking me up to an IV wasn’t practical for some reason, but they much preferred the IVs, since that didn’t involve opening a hole in my stomache that might cause problems during the mission.”

_ Why did Tony think he could do this by himself? He should just call Steve-  _

“Don’t tell Steve,” Bucky said, and Tony jumped and nearly overbalanced in his seat. “He doesn’t need to know the gory details. It’ll just upset him.”

_ And what do you think  _ I _ am, politely bored? _

“Well, then, we can be sure this will be a new experience for you. Yay for new experiences, variety is the spice of life, all those things,” he said instead. He could barely talk about his  _ own _ trauma for more than an unguarded second at a time. No need to encourage Bucky to talk about things obviously better left in the past. 

Except that Bucky was looking at the neatly-sliced pizza like it was a menu written in Korean.

“I don’t actually know how to eat anymore,” he said. 

“What?”

Bucky shrugged. 

“I don’t know how to eat anymore. I think they electrocuted the knowledge right out of my mind around the time they switched me over to tube feeding. Either that, or induced a stroke, it’s sometimes hard to remember which ones they did for which things. They preferred using electricity because they could turn it on and off at will, but there was one doctor who really thought controlled strokes were the way to go. I think he was trying to find a cure for them, too, which was a pretty big conflict of interest, but HYDRA didn’t care too much in the beginning if their scientists tested things on me. I wasn’t valuable yet.”

He was going to be sick.

“Okay, no eating. Like, can’t do any part of it, or just can’t do a key step?”

“Can’t swallow. Chewing’s all right, all you have to do is keep your tongue and lips out of the way. And I definitely chewed on my mouthguard a lot, when they were prepping me in the chair, so I don’t think I ever forgot how to do that. But it turns out swallowing is a more involved process than most people think.”

He smiled warmly at Tony and pushed the pizza box gently towards him. 

“It’s okay. I’m happy to just talk while you eat. I don’t know you very well, and that should change if we’re both going to be kissing Steve.”

Tony swallowed, half to calm himself down and hold back the freak-out he wanted to have over that and half to remind himself that _ he _ could still do it.

“Nope, sorry, no can do. You’ve made it a challenge now. Out of curiosity, how are you still standing? It’s been way too long since that whole clusterfuck with the Triskelion for you to have just not consumed anything. You’d have died from dehydration ages ago.”

He pushed the pizza box back into Bucky’s reach. 

Bucky looked uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that he was going to flee. More like the kind of uncomfortable that wanted to seem casual. 

“Whenever I need to drink I just pour the water directly down my throat.”

Oh god, this just kept getting better and better. 

“Wanna give me a little more detail there?”

Bucky’s eyes flickered to the side, like he could only get the words out if he didn’t have to say them directly to another person. 

“I stole some tubes not that long after pulling Steve out of the river. I couldn’t stay with him, even if I wanted to. I was too out of control. He’d broken through my programming, but without it, there was nothing to hold me back or tell me what to do when I encountered something that didn’t make sense.” 

He laughed darkly. “And nothing made sense back then. Without handlers or STRIKE or…” he stuttered over a name, throat choking around an unintelligible sound, then took a deep breath and moved on. “…or anyone from HYDRA to give me orders, I was completely adrift. I was nothing but rage and fear and a couple of tattered memories for context, and I had to get far away from Steve so I didn’t end up turning all of that on him. So I went looking for my old handlers instead.”

God, had he talked with Steve about any of this? This definitely seemed like something he should tell other half of his century-spanning star-crossed love affair, not a virtual stranger. 

But maybe that same closeness and familiarity made it worse- there were things Tony had been able to tell strangers that he’d never been able to tell Pepper or Rhodey. 

“I got lucky and followed one to an old storage site where they used to keep me before and after a mission. After I killed him, I raided the place for supplies. One of the things I found was one of the field feeding funnels they used to force stuff down my throat without getting it in my lungs. Mostly it was for water, but other liquids go down just fine too.”

He looked up and smiled, visibly banishing his early post-HYDRA memories. 

“But I’m positive that pizza won’t fit, even if you roll it up as tight as it can go. But please, don’t let it go to waste.”

Tony narrowed his eyes.

“Come on, Old Man, you gotta keep up! I told you I’d accepted this challenge.”

“I promise, it’s not a challenge.”

“I can’t back out of a challenge once I’ve accepted, Snowflake, that’s not how it works around here. Jarvis, where’s the blender?”

“The one Captain Rogers used this morning to make smoothies hasn’t yet been washed, Sir, but there should be an industrial-strength one in the basement.”

Tony snaked his fingers between Bucky’s metal ones and pulled him to his feet. 

“Right then, off to the basement! This will be a bit of an adventure. I don’t remember what all I shoved down there, so we might even run into an old Iron Legion suit. Don’t worry, if we run into trouble I’ll protect you.”

“Or we could just do the dishes,” Bucky said with a hint of a smile. 

“Spoilsport,” Tony muttered, but allowed himself to be led to the sink, where a small heap of dishes sat forlornly. He turned the faucet on and added a fresh dash of liquid soap. 

Bucky glanced at the spot in the water where the soap had started to disperse, then at Tony, then back at the soap. The plates on his left arm shifted to the vent position and then back again in a wave. 

“Go ahead, Tasty-Freeze.”

The metal hand shot into the water. Bucky shook his hand vigorously through the soap, whipping up icebergs of fluffy soap foam. Tony was pretty sure he could hear the arm vibrating in the water. 

When Bucky was satisfied with the heaping mountain of suds, he pulled his arm out of the water to reveal the white lines where the foam had infiltrated the arm. Large tufts of it stuck to individual plates, lightly clinging to another clump inside the arm. A trail of white foam inched over the plates towards his elbow like a slug’s trail.

Bucky smiled. 

“It’s been a while since it’s had a good cleaning.”

They quickly worked out a system. Bucky scrubbed the dishes clean (and took quick, irregular breaks to watch the suds slide through his arm plates) while Tony rinsed and dried. As they worked, Tony peppered him with questions.

“So, do we need to hunt down a feeding funnel for you too? Because I could have sworn I saw you drink one of Steve’s smoothies without one, but who knows with you super assassins. You could probably carry around an IV in public and no one would see.”

“You saw that?”

“Yep. Thought it was super weird at the time, but hey, everyone’s allowed a little weirdness, especially around here.” 

Bucky hunched his shoulders around his ears. 

“That was… a special situation.” He thrust the last plate into Tony’s hand. “Here, I’ll set up the blender.”

“Special, huh? Special how? Do you need Steve to stand there for inspiration? Because I can totally understand that. I too have been driven to do incredible things in the name of impressing Steve.”

Bucky smiled. 

“No, no need to call Steve. It’s… I’ve been practicing. I can pour water down my throat without any problems, but I’ve been trying to manage it with thicker and thicker things. It’s still a little hit or miss, but I’ve made progress. I can swallow down Steve’s smoothies now, which is great because it was getting tough to keep him from noticing that I never drank them where he could see. The other day I slipped a slice of peach down my throat.”

Tony blinked. “Wait, so you  _ did _ eat that peach I gave you?”

“Yep. Thank you, by the way, I never would have tried that on my own, and now I know it’s possible.”

He wiggled the plug into the socket and shifted to the side so Tony could join him in front of the blender. 

“So, what’s the plan? Are you just going to stick pizza slices in this thing and hit the on button?”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do.”

“You’re just going to stuff a pizza slice into the blender without anything else and turn it on until the whole thing’s been reduced to mush?”

Tony patted his metal shoulder. 

“No,  _ we’re  _ going to stuff a pizza slice into the blender without anything else. Don’t remove yourself from this situation, you set up the blender, you helped me wash it, and you’re going to drink whatever comes out of it.”

Bucky glanced dubiously at the blender.

“I feel like I should get veto power over whether or not I drink it.”

“Veto power is for people who eat enough calories for their body to not have to cannibalize itself, now pick the slice you want to try first.”

Bucky made a big show of examining each slice of the second pizza, measuring the width and length with his fingers and eyeing the crust from above, below, and eye level, before finally choosing one and handing it to Tony with over-the-top formality. 

“Here, let me cut off the crusts so they don’t cause any trouble with the blades.”

Bucky laughed. 

“You think the crusts are going to cause trouble, but not the- are those some kind of fish?”

“They’re anchovies, Sergeant Barnes. While not the most popular, they are still a well-established topping. As per Sir’s concerns about your weight, I placed an order including many toppings, in the hope of boosting your calorie intake for the night,” Jarvis said. “Had I known about your particular troubles, I would have ordered something a little easier to liquify.”

“Oh hey, yeah, how did you hide from Jarvis? He should have seen you practicing your little fake-swallow trick.”

Bucky shrugged. 

“You never installed any cameras under the porch.”

“Yeah, of course I didn’t, because that’s a level of paranoid I aspire never to reach.”

“It’s not paranoia if there’s actually an infamous assassin living under there.” Bucky’s eyes gleamed mischievously. 

“One, I  _ know  _ you’re down there, so I still wouldn’t gain much by installing the extra security, and two, stop sleeping under the porch. I can afford such fabulous beds, you wouldn’t believe it.  _ Way _ nicer than sleeping in dirt and dead bugs.”

“You know, I think I’m good,” Bucky said. He jammed three de-crusted pizza slices into the blender and switched it on. “It’s a little too open up here to sleep comfortably.”

_ “Steve’s _ up here,” Tony shot back. “I don’t know about you, but I definitely feel safe snuggled up in his arms every night.”

“Nice argument, but I know my Steve. It’d be like having a golden retriever for a guard dog, if you know what I mean. If there was ever an intruder, he’d offer them a snack and give them a solemn talk about ‘thinking about their choices’ instead of grabbing that big vibranium target of his and laying into them.”

Well, getting Bucky to eat  _ and _ sleep in a real bed was probably unrealistic, so Tony let the matter drop. The fact that he didn’t want to surrender his nights with Steve to someone else had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The blender whirred with alarming volume. He tried to see if the blades had made any progress on the pizza, but it was spinning too fast for him to tell. 

The seconds ticked on, marked only by the grinding sounds of the pizza hopefully getting reduced to a liquid form. The warm, easy atmosphere between him and Bucky cooled with each passing second of silence, but Tony couldn’t seem to break it. 

A small buzzing from his watch alerted him that the first batch of soil samples he’d started processing earlier were done. He ignored it by grabbing one of the leftover pizza slices and taking a bite.

_ Have you thought about seeing a doctor about this? _ he almost asked, before remembering that he himself would probably at least try to build himself a robotic throat before he let some doctor he didn’t know try and teach him how to swallow again.  _ You should really tell Steve about this, you know he’d help you any way he could _ , he would have said if saying so wouldn’t have made him a hypocrite.  _ Are there any other health issues you’re hiding? _ sounded too accusatory. 

_ Hey, so I gave Steve permission to date you so long as he didn’t dump me but I never actually discussed it with you because I’m feeling all kinds of weird things about you and you being here and I’m not touching any of them with a ten foot pole, so I don’t actually know what you guys talked about and I suddenly realize that I don’t know what is and isn’t off-limits with you two or what  _ you _ feel about any of this  _ would have to wait for a less vulnerable moment, preferably never. 

“How do you feel about soups,” he finally said. 

Bucky shrugged. “Depends. I think I could get tomato soup down, but if it’s something like chicken noodle I’ll probably choke on something.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, gravity’s a bitch.”

They fell quiet again. 

Finally, when contents of the blender seemed to have fallen to the bottom somewhat, Tony reached out and hit the off button. 

The inside was mostly still solid, though cut up into small enough bits to settle to the bottom without any big air pockets. 

“I think we need to add some liquid to this,” Tony muttered as he stirred the mashed-up pizza with a fork. “It’s all just a little too solid.”

Bucky glanced inside the blender and made a face. 

“I know you said you never back down from a challenge, but that’s not a lot of progress. I could probably have shredded them faster. Steve’s gonna get back from Sam’s place eventually, and I’ve gotta head down under the porch before too long if I want to get a good night’s sleep.”

“Here, pass me the soda, I’m sure I had Jarvis put some on the order. That should speed things up a little.”

Pouring about a third of the Pepsi bottle into the blender did indeed speed up the liquefaction process, though it had the downside of turning what had been a mildly gross-looking mess of torn-up pizza that more or less resembled a layer of lasagne into something truly disgusting to contemplate putting in his mouth. 

Bucky swirled the fork through the mess this time.

“It’s still a little too chunky, I think. Is there another setting on this thing?”

“There are several different settings on the one in the basement, but I think this one is a more basic model.”

“Try adding more Pepsi then, maybe that will help.”

Adding another third of a bottle of Pepsi didn’t help much. 

“Okay, so this thing feels like it’s about the consistency of pudding now, maybe a little thicker. Can you swallow pudding?”

Bucky wrinkled his nose. 

“Smooth pudding, sure. That ball of chime you’re scraping around? Probably not.”

Steve chose that moment to wander into the room.

He came to a stop in the kitchen doorway and stared at the two of them, hovering over a blender full of disgusting brown sludge roughly the consistency of half-dried toothpaste, a mostly full box of Tony’s weird fancy anchovy pizza, and a mostly empty bottle of Pepsi like raccoons lording over a pile of stolen garbage. 

“What’s going on?” He asked. 

Bucky went stiff against Tony’s side. Shit, how did they explain this without spilling the beans about Bucky’s food issues?

_ Don’t lie, Tony, just tell the truth in flattering light, okay? _ A memory of Pepper implored him like the ghost of Press Conferences Past. 

“Hey Steve! Murderbritches and I were just having a little contest to see who could put the weirdest ingredients in the blender and still get something that could pass as a smoothie. I’m going to win, obviously, as soon as we can get this pizza to act a little more like a liquid and a little less like a ball of bad hummus, but maybe you can step in and save your Boo Bear with an eleventh-hour new smoothie recipe.”

Steve looked at the ball of pizza-and-Pepsi chyme stuck to the sides of the blender like it was a live grenade. 

“You’re going to  _ eat _ that?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “No, honey, I told you, it’s supposed to be a smoothie. We’re going to  _ drink _ it.”

Against his side, tension seeped slowly out of Bucky’s taut muscles as the certainty of discovery became more of a  _ possibility.  _

“Yeah, Steve,” he said. “You’ve made what, a hundred smoothies since you got here? Are you telling me you  _ still _ don’t know what a smoothie is?” 

He reached for the Pepsi bottle and poured the last of it into the blender, then slapped the cap on and flipped the switch. The tired whirring of the blender blades fighting through the chunky mass of pizza filled the room. 

Steve heaved a sigh (which looked gorgeous, of course, through his tiny white shirt) and leveled them with his best  _ is this really what you’re doing with yourselves? _ look. 

“Here, have a piece of pizza while we wait for this to finish,” Tony offered, gesturing at the box. 

Bemused, Steve took one. 

“So, who has to drink the pizza smoothie?” he asked. 

“Mr. Assassin over there, but he won’t drink it unless it’s actually liquid, so if this doesn’t work we’re going to have to either hunt down some more soda or take this down to the lab.”

“Those are really the only options?” Steve asked. “There’s no Option C: Throw it in the trash and start over?”

“That’s quitter talk, Steve,” Bucky said solemnly. “Did your ma raise a quitter?”

Steve’s eyes turned to steel. 

“Oh, is that how it’s gonna be?”

“That’s how it’s gonna be.”

“Then give me that.”

Steve crossed the kitchen in five long strides and snatched the blender off the counter. He fumbled the lid off, oversized fingers scrabbling against the edges for a few seconds, and reached in to pull out a handful of still-not-liquid pizza smoothie. Without breaking eye contact with Bucky, Steve shoved the greasy handful of slush into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. After a second, he shuttered in disgust. 

“That might actually be worse than army rations,” he said. 

* * *

After cleaning out the blender and throwing the contents in the garbage, Steve made strawberry smoothies and helped Tony finish the rest of the pizza. 

Before they went their separate ways, however, Tony pinched Bucky’s sleeve. 

“If you want,” he whispered, “I’ll make you a collapsible funnel. We’ll pretend it’s a funky necklace or something.”

“Thanks,” Bucky whispered back. 

Then he disappeared under the porch and Tony followed Steve up to the master bedroom. 

* * *

The necklace funnel turned out pretty nice, if Tony did say so himself. Collapsed, it looked like concentric rings. He shaped the clasp holding it flat like a star, and attached it so it sat right in the middle. When Bucky laid eyes on it, he smiled as unselfconsciously as Tony had ever seen. 

“I’d wear this even if it didn’t do anything special.”

“Thank you, I aim to please. Now, if you push on the top spike of the star, a little clasp inside releases, see, and you can pull that part aside. Now you can hook your pinky finger through the ring like this, and pull outwards.”

He demonstrated, pulling the center of the flat circle out until it turned into a funnel.

“Then to collapse on it, just push it back inwards and reattach the clasp in the middle to keep it flat. Think you can do that?”

The sound of Steve’s footsteps coming down the stairs interrupted them.

“I guess we’ll see,” Bucky said, and slid the necklace over his head. 

“Hey guys,” Steve said. He wrapped an arm around each of their waists and pulled them in one at a time for a quick forehead kiss. “I’m making grilled cheese for lunch. That sound good to you two?”

“Sounds delicious,” Tony said. Bucky just nodded his agreement. Steve smiled, then shooed them out of the kitchen.

* * *

Sometime during lunch, Bucky disappeared for a few minutes with his smoothie. When he returned, he tapped his necklace and gave Tony a discrete thumbs up. His tall glass was completely empty.

* * *

A week later, Steve climbed into bed next to Tony and said “Hey babe? Can we talk about something?”

Tony felt his body jump into high alert mode. 

“Sure thing,” he said slowly. “What’s on your mind?”

“It’s about Bucky,” he said. 

For a second, Tony swore he felt a wave of ice pour down his spine. 

_ This is it he’s breaking up with you- _

He took a deep breath and forced that thought away. They were just going to talk. Steve had no reason to break up with Tony because Tony let him have Bucky too. Everything was fine.

“What about him?” He asked. 

“I think he might have some sort of eating disorder.”

_ What. _

“Or maybe not? Maybe it’s just leftover conditioning, but either way, something’s wrong with him, Tony. He hasn’t eaten anything since he got here, at least not where I’ve seen. He always has a good excuse to turn down food, and I don’t want to make him feel like I’m micromanaging him or, or like I don’t trust him, but this can’t keep going. Can it?”

He looked at Tony like a drowning man about to call for a life preserver. 

“I’ve been sneaking vitamins and supplements into his smoothies, since every once in a while he actually drinks one. But recently, he’s been finishing off every single glass. I’m starting to think he’s figured out a way to dump them down a drain or something without me noticing.

“I’m worried, Tony. I didn’t say anything until now because I didn’t want to upset him or make him feel like I don’t think he could take care of himself, but it’s been weeks and he’s still so thin. I’d sort of hoped that food was just scarce on the run, and that once he moved in and got used to having food whenever he wanted it, he’d start to gain it back, but he just hasn’t.”

He squeezed Tony’s hand. 

“And I didn’t want to tell  _ you _ because it didn’t feel right to ask you to let me date him, then make our alone time about him too.”

“Hey, I don’t remember you asking anything. I  _ told you _ to date him,” Tony interjected. 

Steve gave a huffing laugh. 

“I know, I know. I’ve been talking with Sam, and he said that not talking about it wasn’t going to help anyone, especially if we’re not going to be monogamous anymore. So, here goes, I guess.”

He looked up at Tony with those big puppy-dog eyes and said, “I don’t know what to do.”

All the words fled from Tony’s mouth. What could he tell Steve that would make this better? Bucky didn’t want him to know.  _ Tony  _ didn’t want him to know. It would be a breach of trust to tell him, right? This thing Tony had developed with Bucky was still thin, easily ripped apart by a couple of heavy words. 

But Steve already knew, so what was he hiding? That he’d known all along, but hadn’t brought it up because Steve didn’t know how to have a moderate emotion about Bucky Barnes? That he’d aided and abetted Bucky in his attempts to hide his issues from Steve, and had never had any intention of telling him? That in his weaker moments, he’d thought about bunding Bucky to him so Steve would never leave?

“I know,” he said at last. “I’ve- I’ve talked with him about it.”

“What?” Steve asked. 

Tony looked away, letting his eyes rest on one of Steve’s paintings hung in an old frame on the back wall of their room instead of Steve’s open, trusting face. 

“I’ve talked with Bucky about the food thing. You don’t have to worry though!” he hurried to add. “We’ve been working on it. He actually is drinking all those smoothies you make him. And I placed an order for nutritional supplement pills the other day, they should get here before long. Once they get here, he’ll be in even better shape. Finally start catching up on all those vitamin deficits, you know? Except, I guess you’re already doing that.”

“He talked with you?” Steve asked. “That’s… that’s good. I’m glad he felt safe enough to reach out.”

_ I wish he’d reached out to me, _ Tony heard like an undercurrent to his spoken words. 

“Yeah. We talked a bit. He didn’t want to worry you though, so.” He trailed off. “But! He is drinking your smoothies, I promise. And I’ve been chatting with Bruce about the possibility of throwing together some sort of super soldier calorie supplement paste that we can throw in the blender to help bring him back up to weight. Except Bruce doesn’t necessarily know it’s for that, since no one knows Bucky’s here. It’s just a totally hypothetical problem that us science bros are working on because scientists love hypothetical problems.”

“Oh,” Steve said. “That’s good to know.” 

A warm arm reached out and pulled Tony down and back against Steve’s chest, tight enough that Tony swore he could feel that scientifically perfect heart beating through the barrier of his back, traveling in his blood in gorgeous waves of sound and shock turned to movements until every part of his body rang with it. It made him want to do something to make that steady beat speed up or slow down, or maybe even skip. Steve’s heart hadn’t stuttered yet, at least not where he could capture the moment on biosensors, but Tony had always loved a challenge. 

The fact that it was another man who inspired tonight’s clinginess hardly weighed down his stomach at all. A piece of gravel, perhaps, or a skipping stone, rather than a millstone. 

“Thank you, Tony,” Steve said into his hair. 

“Don’t thank me, this was just as much for me as for you or him. I can’t have my lover’s lover wandering around the place slowly starving to death. It ruins the whole aesthetic. My interior decorators spent hours choosing the color scheme and design themes, Steve. I can’t let your boyfriend mess up all their hard work.” 

Words poured off his tongue and through his teeth like a shower of raindrops off a branch shaken by an unwary passerby during a rainstorm. If the abrupt deluge of light little words could distract Steve, maybe they could put off the Emotions Conversation he could feel brewing like an advancing line of dark clouds on the horizon. 

Steve squeezed his hips gently. The feeling of those big hands pressed into the contours of his body sent a shiver of delight shuddering from his hips straight down to his toes. 

“It’s okay to tell me that you wanted to do something nice for Bucky. I promise, I won’t get mad about it.” 

He was facing away from Steve, but he could hear his words bending around a small, jovial smile, could feel it in the spiderweb-light movements of Steve’s lips against his scalp. 

“Come on, I can’t just let the guy starve to death in my kitchen. He’d probably haunt it. And he’d be a  _ persistent _ ghost, too.”

“I’m glad you’re getting to know him. I think you two could be good friends.”

“If he haunts my kitchen long enough, sure.”

The air from Steve’s quiet laughter was warm on his skin. 

“Tony, I’m serious!”

“So am I! Here’s how I bet it goes down. I bet he’d think I was an easy target, on account of how he literally starved to death in my kitchen, that’s the sort of irony that they put in sixth grade textbooks so even the kids like me who don’t pay attention can grasp the idea, but boy is he in for a surprise. No matter how determinedly he haunted the place, he wouldn’t be able to get anything out of me until my morning coffee. But he keeps trying. Slowly, without realizing it’s happening, we establish a rapport. Then  _ you _ ,” he shoved his hips back into Steve’s belly for emphasis, “would do something dumb. A real  _ his-head-must-be-as-empty-as-a-balloon _ move. And we find ourselves giving you a perfectly choreographed duet of a dressing down, me telling you all the reasons you should have died and Bucky rattling the cupboards and moaning ominously for effect. It’ll be the moment of perfect harmony between us.”

“So you’re saying I should let loose and be a little more reckless on missions then until you two stop dancing around each other like growling dogs?”

“No! That wasn’t the takeaway from this!”

Steve laughed in delight and relaxed under Tony’s fingers. 

“Okay, okay, I get it. Tony Stark wouldn’t know altruism if it looked him in the face because he’s a badass CEO,  _ of course _ he’s helping his lover’s lover figure out his issues. Wouldn’t want it to get out to the tabloids.” 

Tony rolled his eyes. 

“You’re laying the sarcasm on kinda thick there, honey.”

“And you won’t let me thank you for doing a good thing!”

_ “Because I shouldn’t let you thank me for doing the absolute least I could do.” _ Tony insisted. “Besides, I- I didn’t always have the purest of motives.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Steve,” Tony said airily, hoping if he makes the words light enough he wouldn’t get dragged down by the weight of their conversation. “You know me. Tony Stark, also known as Fifty Different Insecurities in a Trenchcoat. I wasn’t some sort of therapist stand in, guiding your boyfriend to a healthier lifestyle with grace and no ulterior motives but the goodness of my own heart. I wanted him to like me, because I thought that somehow if he liked me then you wouldn’t get rid of me, or something. So I took advantage of him.”

“Keeping him from starving himself doesn’t sound like “taking advantage” to me,” Steve laughed. 

“But I did, though! I kept it all a secret from you, so it was just the two of us in cahoots. I was jealous whenever I saw you two, even though I knew I had no right to be, so I reached out to him even though I knew he was vulnerable and didn’t have anyone but us in his life, and I helped him hide everything from you. That necklace I gave him? It’s a collapsible funnel, so he can have an easier time with the smoothies-  _ why are you laughing?” _

“I’m sorry Tony,” Steve said, shoulders shaking with mirth. “But all I’m hearing is ‘oh no, I’m such a bad person, I made friends with Bucky and helped him out.’”

“My motivation was terrible, though!” Tony insisted. “Don’t laugh, it’s true. I only reached out to him because I was a jealous, insecure loser and was scared you’d dump me for Bucky unless I could get him to like me!”

“Tony, why would I leave you for Bucky? I’m already dating  _ you both, _ and you were the one who told me to date him in the first place.”

“I know, but what if you did?” Tony said, gesturing wildly with the arm that wasn’t pinned against Steve’s side. “What if you realized how much more in love with him you were and that you didn’t need me?”

The arm around him squeezed tighter, then flipped him over so he lay face-to-angel’s-face with Steve.

“Tony. I promise you, from the bottom of my heart, that I will always love you. Nothing anyone else says or does or is will ever change that.”

“Okay, but, you can’t promise that,” Tony stammered. “People fall out of love all the time.”

“I won’t,” Steve said solemnly. “I will love you for as long as you let me.”

He pressed a kiss to Tony’s forehead. 

“And since I love you, I’m not going to let you badmouth yourself anymore. We can talk with Bucky in the morning about starting some sort of weight-gain plan. We’ll find something that works for him, and we’ll go from there. But in the meantime, I’m going to show you how much I love you.”

He pressed quick little butterfly kisses to Tony’s face between each word, until a smile had snuck up on his cheeks and the weight of the guilt and jealousy he’d been carrying around since seeing Bucky on the front porch began to ease. 


End file.
